Over 130 dead in Philippines storm
A tropical storm in the southern Philippines triggered mudslides and flash floods that killed 133 people and left dozens missing, police said on Saturday.
Tropical Storm Tembin has lashed the nation’s second-largest island of Mindanao since Friday, AFP wrote.
The Philippines is pummeled 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.
Rescuers meanwhile retrieved 36 bodies from the Salog River in nearby Sapad town on Saturday.
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.
The death toll for Mindanao’s Zamboanga peninsula also rose to 28, and police said 81 people were missing after mud and rocks swept down coastal communities in Sibuco and other fishing towns.
Landslides had blocked rescue and relief convoys to the impoverished region, officials said Saturday.
Tembin struck less than a week after Tropical Storm Kai-tak left 54 dead and 24 missing in the central Philippines, straining the disaster-prone nation’s resources.
The deadliest typhoon to hit the country was Haiyan, which killed thousands and destroyed entire towns in heavily populated areas of the central Philippines in November 2013.