Mayor of Typhoon-Ravaged City Urges Residents to Flee TACLOBAN, the Philippines - The mayor of this typhoon-ravaged city urged residents on Wednesday afternoon to flee to other cities and find shelter there with relatives if they could, saying that the local authorities were struggling to provide enough food and water and faced difficulties in maintaining law and order. The appeal from Mayor Alfred S. Romualdez came as the first attempt in Tacloban to conduct a mass burial ended in failure. A police convoy of trucks carrying more than 200 rotting corpses turned back after hearing gunshots as they approached the city limits. Covered with black plastic tarpaulins, the bodies were returned to a gathering place at the foot of the hill topped by City Hall, where they released a powerful odor. Mayor Romualdez said that the city desperately needed trucks and drivers to distribute relief shipments of food that are piling up at the city's airport, as well as more trucks, heavy equipment and personnel to pull decaying corpses out of the unending mounds of debris and collapsed houses that stretch across this city. "I have to decide at every meeting which is more important, relief goods or picking up cadavers," he said. Mr. Romualdez denied persistent rumors of gunfights among the increasingly hungry and thirsty population, saying that business owners and others were only firing warning shots. "That's why sometimes you hear gunshots, but it is to ward off looting," he said. He did not offer any municipal assistance to those seeking to leave the city, noting that the city had virtually no working vehicles. The local fleet of light buses and group taxis in Tacloban, a city of 220,000 before the typhoon, was destroyed by the storm surge. The United States and the Philippines have been offering some seats on planes leaving after dropping off relief supplies. Jerry Sambo Yaokasin, the second-ranking official in the municipal government, said in an interview that Philippine soldiers and police officers may be stretched too thin to provide security in Tacloban even as they try to reach other coastal communities to assess damage. He suggested that foreign forces may be needed, including to provide security for gas stations to reopen. "If the United States will come in, if it will be allowed to come, or if the United Nations can come in, it will really help us secure the city," he said. The Philippines is a former Spanish possession and then was an American possession, and any suggestion that it needs to rely on foreign forces can be an emotional issue here. Mr. Romualdez disagreed with Mr. Yaokasin on the need for security forces from outside the Philippines, saying that, "right now, that won't be necessary." The Philippines has one of the world's most heavily armed civilian populations, few effective gun control regulations and a tradition of violence being used in personal disputes, legacies of being an American possession before World War II. Service station owners are refusing to start pumping fuel from their underground storage tanks for fear that they will be robbed by desperate people, Mr. Yaokasin and Mr. Romualdez each said separately. The result has been the virtually complete disappearance of gasoline and diesel at any price, immobilizing aid vehicles and private cars alike. Scavengers have already combed over the large numbers of vehicles crushed, overturned or otherwise damaged during the typhoon, siphoning fuel from them. Ample gasoline and diesel reserves remain in the city, but officials must find a way to provide security for their distribution, Mr. Yoakasin said. He added that the shortage of vehicles and fuel had become so acute that he no longer had a car himself and had to hitch rides to move around the city. Valerie Amos, the United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, held a public meeting with Mr. Romualdez at a building next to City Hall and promised international assistance. But she said that the United Nations desperately needed service stations to open in order to operate trucks here. "We have to have fuel, so we have to have some kind of refueling center," she said.