Using diggers or bare hands, rescuers continued Wednesday to dig through the mud in search of bodies in remote villages in the central Philippines, where at least 67 people died and many others disappeared in gigantic rockslides caused by Tropical Storm Megi.
At least 13 people have died and 150 are missing in Pilar, a coastal village of around 400 people in the central province of Leyte, according to Lemuel Traya, the mayor of Abuyog municipality of which Pilar is a part.
“To be honest, we don’t expect to find any more survivors,” he told AFP.
Most of the houses were literally pushed into the sea by a massive landslide.
Ara Mae Canuto, 22, was at her family home in Pilar when she heard a noise “like a helicopter” coming up. She tried to flee, but found herself caught in the muddy waters and nearly drowned.
“My ears and my nose were filled with mud,” she told AFP by phone from the hospital where she is being treated. Her father died, and her mother is missing.
Arrived by boat in Pilar, the access roads being cut off, the rescuers evacuated around fifty survivors to the neighboring town of Abuyog.
When the boat arrived, rescuers rushed to the injured to dress their wounds and wrap them in survival blankets.
“This disaster breaks my heart,” Lemuel Gin Traya, the mayor of Abuyog, wrote on Facebook. According to him, the village was “completely devastated”.
Most of the deaths recorded so far – at least 48, according to local authorities – have occurred around the town of Baybay, also in Leyte province. Several agricultural villages in the area were suddenly buried under reddish mudslides rolling down the hills.
Suspended overnight, the search resumed Wednesday at dawn, using construction machinery or sometimes even with bare hands.
According to local authorities, an improvement in the weather allowed relief workers to reach the hardest hit areas.
“We were told to be on the alert because a storm was approaching, but they didn’t directly tell us to evacuate,” said Loderica Portarcos, a farmer from Bunga village who lost 17 members of her family. family and a friend in the disaster.
In the clammy heat and the most unbearable smell of death, Ms Portarcos, 47, guides a backhoe operator to the spot where she saw three bodies buried in the mud.
“Our deceased parents are all in the morgue, but we will not have time to organize a funeral wake” because of the state of decomposition of the bodies, she laments.
The Megi storm also killed three people in the province of Negros Oriental (center) and three others on the southern island of Mindanao, according to the National Disaster Management Agency.
Megi, known in the Philippines by its local name of Agaton, is the first major tropical storm to hit the country this year.
It blocked thousands of travelers at the start of Holy Week, a traditional period of travel for Filipinos.
As the planet is affected by global warming, storms and typhoons are becoming more powerful, scientists warn.
The Philippines, ranked among the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, is hit by an average of 20 storms each year.
In December 2021, Typhoon Rai devastated much of the country, leaving more than 400 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. And in 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful to have ever made landfall, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca