DOZENS BURIED IN PHILIPPINES LANDSLIDE TRIGGERED BY TYPHOON.
Dozens buried in Philippines landslide
ITOGON, THE PHILIPPINES• Hundreds of rescuers in the Philippines dug frantically with shovels and their bare hands Monday in an attempt to save the lives of dozens of people buried by a landslide triggered by Typhoon Mangkhut.
Despite their best efforts, weary aid workers were only able to pull bodies from the mud and debris that had engulfed a church and miners’ bunkhouse where people had been sheltering from the fierce rain and winds topping 240 km/h in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Grief-stricken relatives, many of them quietly praying, waited anxiously near the disaster site.
Victorio Palangdan, the mayor of Itogon, warned that the chances of finding any survivors were slim, raising the prospect that the previously confirmed Philippine death toll of 65 from the typhoon could rise significantly.
Palangdan told a news conference that of the 40 to 50 people thought buried, there’s a “99 per cent (chance) that they are really dead.” He said dozens of residents had refused to heed police warnings to leave. “They laughed at our policemen. They insisted,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “They were resisting when our police tried to pull them away. What can we do?”
Most of the buried are believed to be poor miners and their families, who were working illegally at the mine site after it was closed in the 1990s.
Tens of thousands of small-time miners have moved north in recent years to try to eke a living out of old gold mines despite the risks.
Roy Cimatu, the environmental secretary, said soldiers and police would be deployed across six mountainous northern provinces to stop the illegal mining that has made hillsides unstable and vulnerable to landslides.
Meanwhile, foreign aid has begun to pour into the Philippines, which will face months of recovery after farms across the island of Luzon, which produces much of the nation’s rice and corn, were submerged in muddy floodwater just a month before harvest.
Francis Tolentino, a senior adviser to Rodrigo Duterte, the president, estimated that nationwide 5.7 million people had been affected by the storm.
Hong Kong also began to clear up “severe and extensive” damage after Mangkhut struck on Sunday, leaving 300 injured. Roads remained blocked by felled trees and debris and some areas remained severely flooded.
Windows in swaying tower blocks had been smashed by strong winds. In the neighbouring gambling enclave of Macau, all 42 casinos shut down for the first time in its history as the storm approached.
They opened again Monday but Macau was still in recovery mode after severe flooding hit parts of the city, forcing emergency workers to rescue people from shops and homes using boats and jet skis.
After tearing through Lu- zon and pummelling Hong Kong and Macau, the storm hit China’s Guangdong province, killing four people, three of whom were struck by trees. More than three million people were evacuated.
In the city of Zhuhai, a stone’s throw from Macau, volunteers and police pulled fallen trees and debris off highways.
Rice paddies and banana plantations along the highway were flooded and destroyed, while some factories in nearby industrial areas also suffered damage.
But by Monday afternoon, the terrifying storm had been downgraded to a tropical depression as it moved into Guangxi province on a path to the mountainous Yunnan province, where it was expected to weaken further as it approached Vietnam, Laos and Burma.