TACLOBAN, Philippines » By the time Bjorn Racaza joined the crowds rummaging through Robinsons Department Store, he thought he was too late. It was around 6 p.m. Nov. 10, two days after Typhoon Haiyan destroyed much of this city of 235,000, and the plundering of its largest department store – some for necessities, some of it not – was in full fury.

"When I got here the rice was gone," said Racaza, 34, who works in customer service for a Hyundai dealership here. "The only thing that was not touched was the spaghetti." So he grabbed a box, later finding sauce to go with it.

As he pushed a cart through the department store in this city’s largest mall, his two cousins fanned out to grab other goods. Then the looters broke open a storeroom, and Racaza was able to find some things he really wanted: clothes and shoes, not just in his size, but for his parents, his sister and her young children.

"I said, ‘Wow, this is really a Christmas present,’" Racaza said.

In interviews, Racaza and others explained their theft as the product of a desperate situation. Their city had been hit by a horrific typhoon, and in the immediate aftermath the prospects of relief were faint. But the looting went far beyond necessities to taking anything people could get their hands on, including jewelry, appliances and vehicles.

Robinsons is now a largely empty shell, with piles of glass, soaked papers and broken mannequins scattered on the floor. Parts of the roof are missing. The wheels of display vehicles have been stolen. A single alarm still sounds nearly two weeks after the storm.

The streets of Tacloban, which are now dotted with police checkpoints, feel far safer than they did a week ago. The lack of power means little light in the evenings, though, and an 8 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew remains in force.

Business owners say they still worry about security concerns, and the post-storm breakdown in law and order has slowed the return of normal commerce here. Aid groups said looting did not affect the distribution of relief supplies, though two Philippine Red Cross convoys were delayed last week on Leyte Island because of security concerns, said Ryan Jay Jopia, the health services department manager for the group.

In downtown Tacloban, debris has been mostly cleared from the streets, but in some places it has just been pushed onto sidewalks and parking places. Overturned cars that once blocked intersections have been pushed aside.

At the open-air market downtown, stalls selling fruit, fish, shellfish, vegetables, soft drinks, soap and cooking oil have opened, hawking goods next to piles of damp, decomposing debris. Residents say some looted goods were sold here in recent days.

Some banks have begun to open, though they can only offer limited transactions.

A filing cabinet with its drawers pulled open to let their contents dry in the sun sits in front of a UnionBank branch. Staff members charge their computers and phones on a solar powered generator. The outlet opened Thursday, said Joey Samson, 50, a bank employee who drove to Tacloban from Manila to help reopen outlets after the storm.

"We’re not worried about security," Samson said. The branch has an armed guard, and the police have set up a roadblock immediately across the street.

The police have been trying to round up looters and recover lost goods. Many of their roadblocks have items confiscated from vehicles on suspicion that they were looted. In Tacloban on Wednesday, the police placed four motorcycles in the back of a trailer. They had been hidden along the waterfront and were probably stolen after the storm, said Inspector Karl Sanchez of the Philippine National Police Special Action Force, which has been dispatched to Tacloban to help a local police force vastly diminished by the storm. Three or four men suspected of stealing the motorcycles escaped by boat during the police raid, Sanchez said.

Security concerns were exacerbated by the breakout of prisoners from detention facilities on Leyte Island. The Tacloban City Jail saw nearly 160 prisoners escape after the storm, when storm waters broke the main gate, said Januario Tragura, a senior jail official. As of Thursday 85 prisoners were still missing. The rest were recaptured or voluntarily returned, he said.

In the city of Palo, just south of Tacloban, more than 600 inmates escaped from the provincial prison and 300 fled the city jail, Mayor Remedios Petilla said. Only a handful have since returned, she said.

Most of the looting was not done by hardened criminals, but by ordinary citizens.

Marlon Taqo, 46, a correspondent with The Freeman, a newspaper in Cebu, began looting goods after his house and all his possessions were destroyed by the huge storm surge.

He relocated his wife and two daughters to the Leyte provincial capital building in Tacloban, but with only 50 pesos (or about $1) in his pocket, he did not know how he could buy rice and medicine for foot injuries that he suffered in the storm.

He walked to the Rose Pharmacy, where he noticed several friends taking items. He grabbed some antibiotics and from another store he took rice, chocolates and candy.

"Anybody will do it," he said. "Anybody will loot to stay alive and keep his family alive."

Still, not all looted goods were necessary for survival.

Marvin Martinez, 39, said he went to Robinsons with his wife Sunday.

He was worried about the possibility of a stampede, so he told her to sit in a display vehicle parked in the middle of the mall.

He heard what he thought were warning shots fired by guards to keep looters from going to the department store’s second floor, where nonfood items were sold. So he circled around to an escalator, avoiding the guards to walk up to the second floor. With the power out, he decided to try to find an alternative electricity source.

"Right at the door I saw it was a solar panel. It was just in time," he said. He grabbed it and hurried downstairs. "I am already using it to charge my phones," he said Thursday.

Martinez says he looted because he panicked about the possibility of not getting any help following the storm. Racaza said it would have been foolish to wait for outside aid.

"If you’re just going to stay at home and wait for someone to feed you, that’s not going to work," he said.

Manuel Roxas, a business owner, rejected the assertion that people had to take goods to survive.

"They were not looting for food," Roxas said. "They were stealing."

Roxas named his store Hayward after the San Francisco Bay-area city that was his home in the United States, where he worked for three decades. He plowed his savings into a small grocery store with a hotel on the top floor in downtown Tacloban. The day of the typhoon, he reopened his store after the waters subsided. He continued selling the day after but stopped when customers began grabbing goods without paying.

"Lots of people were stealing, just putting things in their pockets," he said.

"On day three I closed because it was scary," he said. "There was shooting all the time." He left his shop closed for more than a week, finally reopening Nov. 19.

"Until now, it was not safe," he said.

Roxas has closed the 6-foot-tall metal fence in front of his store, placing snacks, cigarettes, soft drinks, eggs and soap shipped from less damaged islands on a table behind it. Customers pass money and receive their items through the fence. With few other commercial outlets available, a steady stream of residents, foreign aid workers and Filipino firefighters stop to purchase goods that are hard to find elsewhere in town.

Roxas said he did not feel totally comfortable reopening his store and worried about his safety, but with his mortgage payment and other expenses coming due, he had no choice.

"I have to open because I owe big bills," he said.

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Austin Ramzy, New York Times

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