 She was the Philippines' worst nightmare. We were like inside a washing machine with the winds very strong. Experts knew the place, the date, and the time she was attacking. By around seven, the first wave of the storm surge hit us, followed by two more waves. But despite the warning, her target was still caught on repair. The third surge is the worst. It's like a tsunami. We were just hanging by the window, by the air convent. Others call her Hayan. But in the Philippines, we call her Yolanda, the world's strongest typhoon to make landfall. No one foresaw that it would be that bad. Everything was flat. Everything was completely destroyed. Yeah, the piles of bodies and the debris, like ground zero. You cannot even talk about your physical losses because all around you, people are dead. Two years after the most deadly super storm, we take an in-depth look at Tacloban cities we're building experience. Government officials, NGOs, and experts reveal the lessons learned after the disaster and uncover what they did to recover, rebuild, and come back a better city. This is Tacloban City today, one of the highly urbanized cities in the Philippines. Viewed from above, hardly any physical trace of the devastation can be seen. The recovery experience of Tacloban from Typhoon Hayan has caught the attention of numerous researchers from around the world. Half of the world now lives in cities and urban centers. And that urbanization process, more people living in cities and urban centers, is accelerating. But in the Philippines, urbanization is fastest in secondary cities like Tacloban. What Tacloban experience can happen anywhere in the Philippines, especially with climate change. Of the onslaught of the disaster, Tacloban suffered from a deadly tsunami-like storm surge that killed almost 2,700 people and caused major damage to infrastructure. Right after the typhoon, it was like wartime. Everybody's houses were destroyed, so we started to just map out who's alive, who's dead. I think the major problem there is, what are we going to do on a daily basis? Should we focus on the relief first, or should we focus on the debris? But the problem is, we lack the resources to help us. In fact, it's the mayor who is driving our truck during that time. We don't have people, we don't have resources, we don't have augmentation. The sheer magnitude of the disaster also wiped out any existing framework for disaster management, pushing local officials to rethink their strategy and role as first responders. Known for so, that it would be that bad. It would be so widespread that all of our, even our department heads could not function. And of course, the lack of a public broadcast system created panic. And then later on, ultimately, the sense of, you know, the loss of security. What really killed Tacloban was when the economy stopped. When there was no more business, there was no more supplies coming in. That's a problem because the entire region depends on us here. We're the center of economic activity in the region. All the warehouses were damaged. Few of them were able to survive. But the problem now was, since there was no police visibility, most of them got looted. The local government should have some kind of a broadcast system. If not, actually they can do the per-region thing. You know, then it'll do away with all of the confusion, the panic, and the franticness that, you know, and the hysteria that led to the looting. Like that, that's actually dangerous. 40,000 houses in Tacloban were also destroyed by Haiyan. Most of these non-jewel houses were built along coastal areas. Right after Typhoon Haiyan, we automatically started work with the master plan on recovery and rehabilitation. We call this the Tacloban City Recovery and Rehabilitation Plan. Essentially, it maps out all the strategies and projects of Tacloban City from right after Haiyan until like 10 years after. It is an inclusive, holistic kind of plan. So it deals with several key result areas for most of which, of course, is housing, which is shelter, infra, livelihood, business, and commerce among many other critical areas. The task is overwhelming, relocating thousands of informal settlers away from danger zones. This is the map of Tacloban City. This is where the surge was. And then this is the north of Tacloban City. And we will be transferring the 15,000 families to this Tacloban North where there are residential places, there are commercial places, there are institutional places. What we did was to have a Tacloban North Technical Working Group to see that every social, economic, infrastructure, services and necessities are there. But that takes time. But among the planned 14,500 households to be relocated, only 7% or 1,000 families have been relocated as of March 2016. Most affected families are poor fisherfolk and so relocation can mean restricted access to their livelihood. At first, they didn't want to relocate. The first problem was to find a place to live. Because most of the people here are fishing. If they return, for the meantime, for daily needs. The national government thinks that relocation is by far the most durable solution to their post-disaster resettlement concern. But experts believe alternative housing solutions should also be explored. People stay in a certain place for a reason. You just can't relocate a certain part of the city to another part of the city that for now is not even prepared to accept that number of people. I know there are issues in terms of water, in terms of power, in terms of connectivity. I think one of the main strategies is really because we had a lot of danger areas. We have to find safer areas. One of our main strategies is really to have a new township to build a city extension in the north of Tacloban City, where the hazards are almost not present except the wind. So the mindset now has also changed. Now people understand that when you don't move from high-risk areas that you're going to die before it was just a concept. Now it's reality. Over the course of two years, Tacloban has received a downpour of support from all corners of the world. More than 150 international organizations set up base in the city for affected communities. For Tacloban, Haiyan provided the opportunity to really build back better. There's a long way to go. There's a lot of work to be done, but I think more or less they have acquired certain capacities that they can use for their own development, but they can also share it with other cities and probably the world. And with the lessons learned, we just don't want to build back but definitely better. This is a good laboratory where the world could learn from. One very critical learning which we can share to other cities or LGUs is to go back to hardcore scientific data. The thing about Tacloban City before Typhoon Yolanda, there was an inconsistency between our hazard maps and what actually happened on the ground. Number two, the planning process is a negotiation process, meaning you just have to be very clear about your priorities in the long run. The Tacloban LGU felt it had innovated or experimented by not really following the steps in total, but finding which will work for us. And then third is to speed things up. Tacloban City averages 20 Typhoons per year. Rebuilding Tacloban is a daunting task for a developing nation like the Philippines. But the disaster opened a lot of opportunities for development and gave the government the chance to once more take the lead, not only in restoring a devastated city, but also in rebuilding a sustainable Tacloban.