TALISEY, Philippines (AP) – The number of people dead and missing from massive flooding and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Trami in the Philippines has reached nearly 130, and the president said Saturday that many areas still need relief. He said many people remain isolated.
Trami blew off the northwestern Philippines on Friday, one of the deadliest and most destructive storms in the Southeast Asian archipelago so far this year, leaving at least 85 people dead and 41 missing, the government’s disaster response said. The station announced. The death toll was expected to rise further as reports came in from previously isolated areas.
Dozens of police, firefighters and other emergency personnel, assisted by three Yumbo vehicles and sniffer dogs, searched the lakeside town of Talisay in Batangas province on Saturday for one of the last two missing villagers. I dug people out.
A father, waiting for news of his missing 14-year-old daughter, wept as he watched rescue workers place her body into a black body bag. Distraught, he chased police officers through a muddy village alley as they carried the body bag to a police van. At that moment, one of the residents came up crying to express his sympathy.
The man said he had no doubt it was his daughter, but said authorities needed to conduct an investigation to confirm the identity of the villager unearthed in the mound.
A nearby basketball gym in the center of town has more than a dozen white boxes containing bodies found Thursday afternoon in a pile of mud, rocks and wood that had washed down the steep slope of a wooded ridge. The coffins were placed side by side. Sampaloc village in Talisay.
On Saturday, President Ferdinand Marcos toured other hard-hit areas southeast of Manila, complaining about the unusually large amount of rainfall the storm had brought, with some areas receiving one to two months’ worth of rain in just 24 hours. ) overwhelmed flood control. In the region whipped by Trami.
“There was too much water,” Marcos told reporters.
“Our rescue efforts are not over yet,” he said. “The problem here is that there are still many areas that remain flooded and cannot even be accessed by large trucks.”
The Marcos administration has said it will embark on a major flood control project that could address the unprecedented threat posed by climate change.
More than 5 million people were in the storm’s path, and nearly 500,000 of them were evacuated to more than 6,300 emergency shelters, mostly in multiple states, the agency said.
At an emergency cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Marcos expressed concern over reports from government forecasters that the storm, the 11th this year, to hit the Philippines could be pushed back by high pressure over the South China Sea and make a U-turn next week. .
The storm was expected to hit Vietnam over the weekend unless it was diverted.
The Philippine government on Friday closed schools and government offices for three days to protect the safety of millions of people in northern Luzon. Inter-island ferry services were also suspended, leaving thousands of people stranded.
The weather improved in many areas on Saturday, allowing cleaning operations to take place in most areas.
The Philippines, a Southeast Asian archipelago located between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, is hit by about 20 storms and typhoons each year. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing and flattened entire villages.
