On the morning Typhoon Haiyan tore through the Philippines, 56-year-old Peter Borromeo fell off the grid.
Days before the typhoon was scheduled for landfall in Tacloban City, meteorologists had already called it "one of the strongest storms ever recorded in modern history." But Borromeo, a real-estate agent, had experienced his share of natural disasters in central Philippines and saw little reason to evacuate.
"I thought that Yolanda [the local name of Typhoon Haiyan] was just like the past calamities that I experienced," Borromeo said. "I realized it was ten times stronger that anything I experienced in the past."
See also: 9 Ways to Help Victims of Typhoon Haiyan
His reaction is not unusual for Filipinos. The Philippines sits in the western rim of the Pacific Ocean, a cyclone-prone area known as the Ring of Fire because of frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity. About eight or nine cyclones, on average, pass through the country annually, although considerably less powerful than Haiyan.
The day before the storm, Borromeo made a pit stop in Tacloban. He booked a room in a two-story apartment by the airport and settled down for the night. The storm made landfall in the province of Eastern Samar at 4:40 a.m. Two hours later, he sent a text message to Katrina, one of his six children, to assure her that he was equipped with a flashlight, and that he was fine.
"I am OK," he reassured her. "When I was a teenager, we experienced this a lot in Tacloban and Calbayog."
That was the last his family heard from him for four days.
When the storm cleared, relief workers and government officials trickled in to assess the damage. Reports put the death toll at 2,500, with at least 673,000 people left homeless.
Panic-stricken, the Borromeo children—some of whom are based in the U.S.—posted search notices and pleas for help across their social networks. They uploaded photos of their dad and deployed friends based in the Philippines to call hotlines and contact people on the ground. A CNN producer looking for stories saw some of their public posts on Facebook, and contacted the family for an interview. "Within minutes, I was on the phone with Anderson Cooper," said Borromeo's daughter Katsy Borromeo-Chiongbian, who lives in Arizona.

The publicity from the CNN interview allowed the family to quickly spread word about their missing father. Within hours, friends and strangers contacted her on Facebook to share information about the situation in Tacloban, although some turned out to be dead ends.
"We used the Google Person Finder, but a lot of people confused the database for missing people with the list of survivors. You cannot believe the grief the false alarms gave us."
Borromeo's sons also made several attempts to search for their father by foot, but the task proved impossible because of the post-disaster chaos that prevailed in the city. Ground transportation was difficult to come by, and desperate survivors resorted to looting shops and dead bodies.
So the long wait went on.
Unaware of his family's efforts to locate him, Borromeo tried to find his own way home. When Haiyan first made landfall in Tacloban, he stayed in his room feeling relatively calm until the typhoon's winds increased to 200 miles per hour, uprooting trees and flipping over cars. Then without warning, the hotel roof blew off, and Borromeo found himself at the mercy of the open sky.
"I was holding on for dear life with my right arm around a post of my hotel room, and used my left hand to cover my head with a pillow for any flying objects that could hit my head," he recalled.
Borromeo clung to the post for four hours, reciting prayers repeatedly until the ordeal was over.

After the storm, he surveyed the damage with other hotel guests before walking to a nearby church for shelter. "Four of their vehicles were floating in the bay, and there was a dead body hanging at the back of my room," he said. "We walked together toward the city and saw more bodies, cars, trucks and pieces of housing materials piled on top of each other."
Borromeo described the next four days as a humbling experience that made him more religious. "People had no shelter, food and water, but you would not hear them complaining about the material things they lost," he said. "They always thanked God they survived."
After living on just a can of tuna and a bottle of water for nearly three days, Borromeo wandered around the city, looking for food and transport. "Without knowing, I had somehow stopped at the door of the Montejos, our family friends," he said. "But there was still no way for us to communicate with our families. I imagined my family would assume I was among the casualties."

Rested and fed, he walked to the airport in the hope of taking a flight home and slept there for two nights. He had no idea that dozens of acquaintances and distant family friends went to the airport and to keep an eye out for him, thanks to the constant alerts his family posted online.
"My friend got reports from other people who spotted my dad in the Tacloban airport," Katsy said. "There are so many people to thank. It's really a miracle, and honestly, I can't ask for anything more."
Image: Dondi Tawatao/Getty Images. Additional images: Peter Borromeo, Katsy Borromeo-Chiongbian