DATU ODIN SINSUAT, Philippines — Severe
Tropical Storm Nalgae pounded the
Philippines on Saturday after unleashing
flash floods and landslides that officials said left at least 45 people dead.
اضافة اعلان
Nalgae churned across the archipelago nation’s main
island of Luzon with winds of up to 95km/h after making landfall on the
sparsely populated eastern island of Catanduanes before dawn.
It has sparked heavy rains across the country, with
areas far from the path of the storm inundated including the southern island of
Mindanao, which has seen flooding and deadly landslides over the past two days.
A sharply revised official toll on Saturday put the
number of deaths on Mindanao at 40, with five others killed elsewhere in the
country.
At least 17 people were missing, while nearly 20,000
had been evacuated.
In the Mindanao village of Kusiong, home to around
100 people, bulldozers and backhoes attempted to remove a thick layer of
limestone rock and mud after parts of a nearby mountain collapsed on Friday.
Fourteen people have so far been pulled from the
debris and more are still missing in the community.
“Had she died of illness it would have been less
painful,” villager Mercedes Mocadef told AFP as she stood by three bodies, one
of which turned out to be the daughter of her cousin.
The dead girl’s mother was also lost in the
disaster.
Landslides and flash floods originating from largely
deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by
typhoons in the Philippines in recent years.
“It could be more than a hundred,” Lester Sinsuat,
mayor in the nearby town of Datu Odin Sinsuat, told AFP when asked how many
were feared dead.
Regional civil
defense chief Naguib Sinarimbo said “this is already a retrieval operation
because the village (Kusiong) has been buried under rock and mud for more than
a day”.
‘Why did we fail?’
Philippine President
Ferdinand Marcos Jr rebuked local civil defense officials in Mindanao over
their preparations for the storm during a televised meeting Saturday.
“It will be important for us to look back and see
why this happened. Why did we fail to evacuate them? Why do we have such a high
casualty (figure)?” he said.
Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that
strike the Philippines each year, but storms that do reach the region tend to
be deadlier than in Luzon and central parts of the country.
The state weather service said the eye of Nalgae was
expected to pass south of the capital Manila, a sprawling metropolis of more
than 13 million people, in the early evening Saturday.
Photos released by the Philippine coastguard showed
rescuers using an old refrigerator as a boat to pull children from a flooded
community on the central island of Leyte.
The storm struck at the beginning of a long weekend
in the Philippines when millions return to their hometowns to visit the graves
of dead relatives.
“If it’s not necessary or important, we should avoid
going out today because it is dangerous,” said national civil defense director
Rafaelito Alejandro, adding that 5,000 rescue teams were on standby.
The coastguard has suspended ferry services
throughout most of the country due to rough seas, stranding thousands of
passengers at ports.
The civil aviation office meanwhile said it has shelved
more than 100 flights.
Storms kill hundreds of people in the Philippines
yearly and keep vast regions in perpetual poverty, with residents also having
to grapple with frequent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and in some areas
armed insurgencies.
Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more
powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.
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