At 4:40am on November 8, 2013, Super Typhoon Haiyan makes landfall on the Philippine island of Leyte with winds over 320 kilometres per hour, dragging a surge of seawater onshore that kills thousands and flattens entire towns across six provinces. Al Jazeera's 101 East team, led by reporter Drew Ambrose, arrives in the immediate aftermath to find more than four million people homeless and 80 percent of buildings in the storm's path destroyed. The film centers on Tanauan, a coastal town where 95 percent of structures were flattened and which stayed cut off for days while world attention focused elsewhere. Mayor Pel Tecson describes losing nearly all the town's relief supplies because medicine and food, stored on the ground floor of City Hall, washed away in the surge; the same building is filmed transformed into a casualty ward treating infected wounds. Survivors along the shoreline recount clinging to wooden planks and refrigerators to survive a five-metre wall of water, with family members still missing. The mayor now wants coastal communities relocated and building codes rewritten.