TACLOBAN (Philippines), Feb 18: Almost 3,000 people are missing and feared dead after a massive landslide buried a village in the central Philippines under a sea of mud on Friday.
Only 109 bodies have so far been recovered along with 57 survivors from the mud that engulfed the farming village of Guinsaugon in the south of Leyte island, rescue official Hermigildo Castil said.
The rain had stopped but the sky was overcast, frustrating helicopter crews trying to land rescue equipment, he said.
About 500 rescuers were digging through the mud, using only shovels, he added.
Maria Lim, mayor of the nearby town of Saint Bernard, and Roger Mercado, the legislator representing the district in the House of Representatives, both raised the number of missing villagers to up to 3,000.
The Red Cross earlier estimated about 200 people were killed and said 1,500 others were missing.
“We now believe that there are 2,000 or 3,000 who are buried there,” Mercado told local radio station DYBL.
“We have maybe a 10 percent chance of recovering them alive,” Lim said.
Several relatives told the station they had received short text messages from the missing villagers as late as early Saturday, appealing for help.
Lim said rescuers resumed their search at first light Saturday morning, having suspended efforts when darkness fell on the village.
Several hundred residents of 11 surrounding hamlets have been moved to higher ground, many of them into Saint Bernard, “for fear that more slides might occur,” the civil defense office in Manila said in a statement.
Experts say the area’s geology, heavy rainfall and deforestation may all have contributed to the tragedy.
Leyte island, which sits on a geological fault, features narrow, flat coastal areas and a mountainous interior and is prone to landslides.
Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz said 500mms of rain had fallen in the area since February 1, nearly five times the average for the month, due to the cyclical weather phenomenon called La Nina in the Pacific Ocean.
More than 5,000 people were killed in a combined flood and mudslide in the Leyte city of Ormoc in Nov 1991.
DESPERATE MESSAGES: A series of desperate text messages from 250 students and teachers trapped in their school spurred rescuers on.
“We’re still in one room, alive,” read one message sent to Pamela Tiempo, whose mother is among the teachers stuck under the mire in the obliterated village of Guinsaugon.
“We are alive. Dig us out,” read another.
But the subterranean pleas for help stopped shortly after 1100 GMT on Friday, and since then there has only been silence.
“We’re still very hopeful,” provincial governor Rosette Lerias said. But the search by soldiers and volunteers using only spades and other hand tools seemed increasingly forlorn.
Relatives of the roughly 40 buried teachers stood nearby, nearly in tears and complaining of the slow pace of the rescue work.
Lerias said 42 bodies have been retrieved a day after the disaster, but they have not discovered any survivors apart from the 57 found by Friday afternoon.
She said rescuers went to the presumed site of the school, but made no headway due to the thick mud. Another group of rescuers, this time composed of experienced climbers with specialist equipment, launched another effort on Saturday afternoon.
The Guinsaugon primary school lay at the foot of Can-abag mountain, whose steep side collapsed on the village on Friday and covered an area of nine square kilometres in dark brown muck.
Lerias said authorities cannot bring in heavy earthmoving equipment due to the soft mud. Two earthmovers are instead being used to transport corpses across a stream that separates the village from the town of St Bernard, about an hour’s drive away.
The bodies are laid in bags or plastic sheets, carried onto a dump truck and driven away.
By mid-afternoon utility workers were stringing up electric wiring for a search expected to last through a second night. A helicopter hovered overhead.
“All they are finding are dead bodies,” said Jimmy Angay, a reporter for DYVL radio, earlier in the day.
Soldiers, local government workers and miners wearing helmets joined the effort to sift through the muddy soil.
The poor agricultural region is desperately unprepared to handle disaster.
“There is nothing more we can do for these people at the moment,” Doctor Russell Dejarmie said at nearby Anahawan hospital, where some survivors were taken.
“They are in shock and they have serious injuries, the extent of which we don’t know becasue we don’t have any X-ray facilities here.”
In St Bernard, a municipal building became an impromptu morgue. A dozen bodies, some with mud still caked on their faces, were laid out on the floor and on benches.
A sound system had been installed in the building for a party which never took place as officials switched to dealing with death.—AFP
