International aid is being sent to the Philippines after Super Typhoon Haiyan killed an estimated 10,000 people over the weekend.
The massive Category 5 storm hit the central islands of the Philippines on Friday, causing vast devastation, wreaking tens of thousands of homes and wiping out entire towns. Haiyan is said to be one of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded in history.
One of the cities hardest hit by the storm is Tacloban, a city of 200,000 people on the island of Leyte. Tacloban now lies beneath piles of debris and bodies sprinkled throughout the streets.
"What worries us is there are so many areas that we have no information from and when we have this silence this usually means that the damage is even worse," Joseph Curry, country representative for Catholic Relief Services, told NBC'S TODAY.
According to NBC News, more than 56,000 homes had been destroyed on the island of Panay, while 83,000 others were damaged. The storm is also estimated to have destroyed up to 80 percent of buildings in its path in the provinces of Samar and Leyte. Two thousand people were missing in Basey, a seaside town about six miles across a bay from Tacloban that has been completely leveled, and early reports suggest that as much as 90 percent of northern Cebu had been destroyed.
Altogether, the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released a statement reporting that nearly 620,000 people were displaced and 9.5 million "affected" across the Philippines.
No longer a powerful typhoon, Haiyan has weakened into a tropical storm and is unleashing its final blow across northeastern Vietnam and southern China. It made landfall early Monday morning local time (Sunday afternoon EST) near Hong Gai, Vietnam, reports AccuWeather.com.
Despite weakening, the storm is capable of producing flooding rain, mudslides and also stronger wind gusts. The gusty winds and flooding rains have also already claimed 13 lives in Vietnam as of Monday afternoon.
Forecasters predict that parts of Northeastern Vietnam may receive over 12 inches of rain, which likely cause some mudslides in far northern Vietnam and southern China.
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