King of storms

Many of those buried in Itogon were small-scale gold miners and their families who took refuge in a building abandoned by a large mining firm.

The Philippines has a poor record of regulating mining, with tunnel collapses and landslides regularly killing people in other gold-rush areas in recent years.

Tearful families surrounded a whiteboard bearing names of the dead and missing as others inspected recovered bodies in an attempt to identify their loved ones.

“Of course his death hurts,” Jocelyn Banawul said after her cousin’s corpse was pulled from the debris. “But he was found, he’s not buried there anymore.”

Across northern Luzon, which produces much of the nation’s rice and corn, farms were flattened and flooded, with the authorities saying crop losses would likely to total more than US$250mn. That could add to the Philippines’ inflation woes and worsen a spike in rice prices that has hit hard the nearly quarter of the nation’s population that survives on less than US$2 a day.

In Hong Kong, which was whacked with gusts of more than 230km per hour that sent buildings swaying and water surging into homes and shopping malls, workers were still busy cleaning up the damage.

In the seafront eastern residential neighbourhood of Tseung Kwan O, dozens of local volunteers set to work on Tuesday.

The community, stacked with tower blocks, was mauled by winds and waves which tore up paths and roadways on the coastal promenade.

Teacher Simon Ng brought his two young daughters down to help with the clean-up. “I would go out here for jogging, bring my kids here to play. Now it looks like a post-war situation,” Ng said.