Nickson Gensis’s Typhoon Haiyan Footage from Hernani

Nickson Gensis filmed destructive water reaching Hernani, Eastern Samar, as Typhoon Haiyan struck on November 8, 2013. His footage for Plan International records the event from an upper floor near the coast.

A tsunami comparison is descriptive, not the mechanism

The original witness account compared the water with a tsunami. In this typhoon setting, the relevant process is storm surge and wave action, not an earthquake-generated tsunami.

Hernani on 8 November 2013

The film records a past disaster. Watch it with its date and location in mind: the scenes show what Gensis encountered then, rather than conditions unfolding today. His decision to keep recording preserves details that a brief description could miss, including the relationship between the damaged surroundings and the people moving through them. It is a difficult piece of eyewitness footage, best understood through its named creator and the event it documents.

Explore more: another water-and-ice event with a misleading tsunami label; weather photographs recording disruption to daily life.

Video: Eyewitness footage of Typhoon Haiyan washing house away (published by Plan International).

The recording came from an upper-floor refuge

Gensis’s account places six people on an upper floor of a boarding house near the coast as the storm reached Hernani. He described choosing to document the scene while others prayed. That first-person context explains the camera position and the fear surrounding the footage without treating the act of filming as a recommendation for someone facing another disaster.

The work continued after the immediate danger

The original account says the group ventured outside around noon and Gensis began assessing damage to communities supported by Plan later that afternoon. He recalled noticing that he was shaking while taking notes. Those details connect the recorded destruction with the person documenting it and the work that followed, rather than allowing the clip to become an anonymous spectacle.

From immediate danger to damage assessment

Gensis’s recording remains closely tied to Hernani and to November 8, 2013. The location, date and Plan International attribution prevent a short, widely shared clip from becoming detached from the people and communities it depicts. His later account adds what the camera cannot: the experience of leaving the boarding house and beginning to assess the damage. Reading that testimony alongside the film gives the event a human chronology, from immediate fear to the difficult work that followed.