MANILA: The death toll from a tropical storm in the southern Philippines climbed to 182 on Saturday, as rescuers pulled dozens of bodies from a swollen river, police said.
Tropical Storm Tembin has lashed the nation’s second-largest island of Mindanao since Friday, triggering flash floods and mudslides.
The Philippines is pummelled by 20 major storms each year on average, many of them deadly. But Mindanao, home to 20 million people, is rarely hit.
Police, soldiers and volunteers used shovels to dig through mud and debris as they searched for bodies in the village of Dalama on Saturday.
“The river rose and most of the homes were swept away. The village is no longer there,” police officer Gerry Parami said by telephone from nearby Tubod town.
Rescuers meanwhile retrieved 36 bodies from the Salog River in nearby Sapad town.
The bodies in Sapad were swept downriver from a flooded town upstream called Salvador, Rando Salvacion, the Sapad town police chief, said.
Authorities in Salvador said they had retrieved 17 other bodies upstream. Tubod, Salvador and Sapad are in Lanao del Norte, which is one of the provinces hardest hit by Tembin.
Disaster officials said many residents had ignored warnings to leave coastal areas and riverbanks.
“Many people were swept to the sea as floodwaters quickly rose due to the high tide,” Manuel Luis Ochotorena, a disaster agency official, said. “They never heeded the warnings. They thought it was a weak storm but it dumped more rains.”
Hundreds of kilometres to the east, army and emergency workers were checking reports an entire village was buried by mudslide near Tubod town in Lanao del Norte.
Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2017