Typhoon causes fatalities in Philippines
San Ildefonso – The strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year left at least six people dead, authorities said yesterday, after heavy rain and fierce winds battered the island.
Typhoon Noru toppled trees, knocked out power and flooded low-lying communities as it swept across Luzon on Sunday and yesterday. There have so far been no reports of widespread severe damage from the storm, which hit the country as a super typhoon.
“We were ready for all of this,” President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr told a briefing with disaster agencies. “You might think that we overdid it. There is no such thing as overkill when it comes to disasters.”
Five rescuers were killed after they were sent to help flooded residents in San Miguel municipality in Bulacan province, near the capital Manila.
“They were deployed by the provincial government to a flooded area,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Romualdo Andres, chief of police in San Miguel.
Andres said the rescuers were wading through floodwaters when a wall beside them collapsed, sending them into the fast current.
An elderly man died after he was hit by a landslide in Burdeos municipality on the Polillo islands, part of Quezon province, where the storm made landfall, said Garner Jimenez from the local civil defence office.
Noru smashed into the archipelago nation on Sunday after an unprecedented “explosive intensification” in wind speeds, the state weather forecaster said earlier. It made landfall about 100km northeast of the densely populated capital, Manila. –