Philippines fears 1,000 killed in typhoon's wrath
Source: Reuters
By Pedro Uchi DARAGA, Philippines, Dec 4 (Reuters) - The Philippines fears up to 1,000 people have been killed in landslides and flooding triggered by Typhoon Durian but officials said on Monday that many of the bodies might never be retrieved. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of national calamity after Durian, which was set to hit the Vietnamese coast on Monday, killed 425 people and left nearly 600 missing across three central regions. Villages surrounding Mount Mayon, an active volcano about 320 km (200 miles) south of Manila, bore the brunt of Durian's wrath when torrential rains and wind sent walls of mud and boulders as big as cars crashing onto rural communities. "It's going to be very difficult, extremely difficult to retrieve all the bodies," Senator Richard Gordon, head of the local Red Cross, told Reuters. "This is such a wide area." "You are probably talking 700 to 1,000 people who have lost their lives." Soldiers, miners and a Spanish rescue team with a sniffer dog dug through the sludge, pulling out corpses and body parts. Nearly 60 people were killed after the chapel they were sheltering in was buried in debris. Even the New People's Army, a communist rebel group locked in a decades-old insurgency against the government, ordered its cadres to help relief efforts. "It is the poor and exploited peasants who have always principally suffered the brunt of natural and man-made disasters," rebel spokesman Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal said in a statement. Residents in Albay province have already endured a series of typhoons this year and the threat of an eruption at Mayon, which triggered mass evacuations when it spewed flaming rocks and lava before calming down in September. The debris left behind proved deadly when Durian struck on Thursday. Durian, one notch below a category 5 "super typhoon" when it hit the Philippines, was expected to cross the Vietnamese coast as a category 1 typhoon, potentially disrupting the coffee harvest. LUCK AND CHANCE Over one million people were affected by the typhoon, which sparked flooding so intense that some people, vainly clinging onto coconut trees, were washed out to sea. At least 100 people were drowned in one village and an Australian and a New Zealander were among the missing. Thousands of people were crammed into schools, churches and town halls after nearly 150,000 homes were damaged, communication lines uprooted and coconut trees, rice paddies and irrigation systems destroyed. Despite the risk of a sudden eruption, poor farmers live on the slopes of Mount Mayon to grow fruit trees and vegetables in its fertile soil. But Gordon said communities needed to be relocated before the next catastrophe strikes. "It's simply casting your faith on luck and chance. You can't do that," he said. Storms regularly hit the Philippines. In the worst disaster in recent years, more than 5,000 people died on the central island of Leyte in 1991 in floods triggered by a typhoon. In 2004, a series of storms left about 1,800 people dead or missing, including 480 who were killed when mudslides buried three towns in Quezon, an eastern province.
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