The death toll from a typhoon that ravaged the Philippinesjumped to 274 with hundreds more missing, as rescuers battled to reach areascut off by floods and mudslides. Typhoon Bopha slammed into the southern islandof Mindanao on Tuesday, toppling trees and blowing away thousands of homes with210-kilometre per hour gusts before easing and heading towards the South ChinaSea.
A total of 253 people died in and around the gold-rushmountain towns of New Bataan and Monkayo due to typhoon-spawned landslides andflash floods there, civil defence chief Benito Ramos told reporters. Twenty-onepeople were killed in other parts of the southern island of Mindanao and thecentral islands.
Cabinet members Mar Roxas and Corazon Soliman, who flew tothe south to inspect the damage, described scenes of utter devastation withthousands of houses ripped apart and corpses lying on the ground. "Theseare whole families, six or seven names with the same surnames. It is saddeningto think entire families have been washed away," Interior Secretary Roxassaid.
"We need to rush to these areas body bags, medicines,dry clothes and most importantly tents, because survivors are living out in theopen," Social Welfare Secretary Soliman said. Bodies caked in mud werebeing transported on the back of army trucks and laid out in rows on tarpaulinswhere relatives searching for missing family members broke down as theyidentified the shrouded corpses of loved ones.
Shell-shocked survivors scrabbled through the rubble oftheir homes to find anything that could be recovered among a surroundingwasteland of flattened banana and coconut trees. Ramos said 279 other peoplewere still missing as of Thursday, while 339 others were treated for injuries.About 178,000 people remained huddled in evacuation centres, mostly crowdedschoolhouses, gyms and other government buildings, officials said. Meanwhile,rescue personnel still struggled to reach areas cut off by the storm where manymore casualties might be found.
President Benigno Aquino said he hoped the country waslearning from its frequent natural disasters, including the roughly 20 cyclonesthat hit each year. "Any single casualty is a cause for distress. Our aimmust always be about finding ways to lessen them," he told reporters in Manila,while pointing out the "big difference" in casualty counts comparedwith previous storms. The more than 500 dead or missing in Bopha was stillbelow the 1,200 deaths from tropical storm Washi, which hit in December 2011,leaving hundreds of thousands homeless in Mindanao, he said.
Aquino said the government was investigating why an armypatrol base in New Bataan, which was washed away in the flash floods, had beenlocated in a flood-prone area.
"According to (survivors), there is a small lake on themountain that gave way so the waters flowed down, not just along the rivers...but all across, like a waterfall, bringing a slurry that covered the wholetown," Roxas said. One shelter there had caved in during the typhoon,forcing the people inside to flee to an even smaller building, he said. Bophawas the most powerful of the 16 storms to pummel the Philippines this year,though Mindanao is not usually on the front line.
