CEBU, Philippines — Three days after one of the most powerful storms ever to buffet the Philippines, the scale of the devastation and the desperation of the survivors were slowly coming into view.

The living told stories of the dead or dying — the people swept away in a torrent of seawater, the corpses strewn among the wreckage. Photos from the hard-hit city of Tacloban showed vast stretches of land swept clean of homes, and reports emerged of people who were desperate for food and water raiding aid convoys and stripping the stores that were left standing.

As Monday dawned, it became increasingly clear that Typhoon Haiyan had ravaged cities, towns and fishing villages when it played a deadly form of hopscotch across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday. By some estimates, at least 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban alone, and with phone service out across stretches of the far-flung archipelago, it was difficult to know if the storm was as deadly in more remote areas.

Barreling across palm-fringed beaches and plowing into frail homes with a force that by some estimates approached that of a tornado, Haiyan delivered a crippling blow to this country’s midsection. The culprit increasingly appeared to be a storm surge that was driven by those winds, which were believed to be among the strongest ever recorded in the Philippines, lifting a wall of water onto the land as they struck. By some accounts, the winds reached 190 miles an hour.