Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

I suppose, It's about the environment. There are many factors to consider.

First, logistically speaking, transport, supply and communication lines in the Philippines are hard to establish because we're an archipelago of 7,000+ islands. The unique geography makes it hard for mass evacuations. Go to high areas, suffer landslides and wind damage, stay low, storm surges wipe you out.

I don't know much about the Indian typhoon season, but the Pacific typhoon season, since the 90's on average, starts at January-March and ends at November-December: it doesn't stop. Fortunately we've had good years, such as the 1998 storm season, the first storm system formed started in July at that time. On average, most of the Pacific storm systems hit us every 3 weeks, there are certain months where parts of the country get hit by a typhoon every other week. So almost all resources are poured into constantly getting supply lines and shelters re-established.

Given this, we Filipinos have been taught, even the children, to consider typhoons to be normal and to have their distinct personalities to look out for. I remember back in 2009 that we took a direct hit with Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy). It wasn't expected to deal that much damage since Hurricane strength is generally associated with wind speed, the measured wind speed wasn't that high. What we didn't we know was that it brought 454.9 mm rainfall in the Metropolis, flooding rural areas in our capital region as high as 4-6meters. Uncertainty is high, resources are low, the islands of Samar and Leyte got hit badly: the eyewall brought in the surge from the east and when the storm passed by, the tail surged the sea inward from the west.

Also, it's hard to get good data. Info and news from the media and government are unorganized, each have their own databases, and not to mention, their own agendas to look good.

Majority of Filipinos consider the lack of financial resources as the biggest factor due to politics and corruption. As mentioned in the comments above, the mayor of the city of Dumaguete can only set aside something like $9,000 USD. Not a lot of resources, considering that's just enough to buy a car here in the Philippines.

The lack of resources and wealth, the difficulty of re-establishing supply lines sets up an environment for such casualties despite preparations.

How can we help this disaster as software engineers? Any ideas?

Long term:

Have a look at websites like this, and see if you can make them better. http://reliefweb.int/ Better means lots of things, but "easier to use with very low or intermittent bandwidth"; "easier to use for an international audience" etc.

Take the most important Wikipedia articles (where "importance" is about STEM education) and polish them into the very best they can be, with clear easy to understand text and nice examples and best diagrams. Translate these to different languages. (Whatever is used in areas that need them, so I guess Spanish, French, Portuguese, and whatever.) This might require a form from WP.

Investigate charities that do good work. Donate to those charities. Good work means different things to different people, but probably includes "doesn't spend too much of its funds on luxury offices and big wages" and "makes a change, doesn't just continue cycles of deprivation".

Research and promote low power computing. Most people have huge computers for what they actually do. Really, using social media, watching a few cat videos, and writing the occasional letter do not need gigabytes of RAM and 3 GHz quad core processors. Help with low resource Open Source projects. Never mind LXDE and XFCE, most people would be fine with JWM or IceWM. Moving people from 100 Watt desktop machines to 8 W arm (or similar) nettops would be useful for climate change.

There's bound to be some interesting but difficult to access research work around distribution - distribution of money and resources within organisations and from those orgs to the places where they're needed. Stuff crossing boundaries is an opportunity for loss. Those boundaries include geographical borders but also include regulatory boundaries for organisations. Visualisations of the journey of a donated dollar through the bureaucracies to the final endpoint would be fascinating, and possibly enraging, for many people.

Vote for people who don't do stupid things to developing nations.

Be careful when donating hardware to charity recycling. Often anything usable is sold off, with the junk being sent to places like the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. Here's a programme and a clip about that dump. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78) (http://videobam.com/rcEUM)

> To completely remove all context […]

Fixed that for you.

Laguna was signal #1, right? I hope everything is OK where you are. My brother and his family live in Nasugbu, I haven't been able to get in touch for a few days - but then again they might be traveling right now so nobody knows if they were even home.