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| Residents are rescued by volunteers Saturday following a flash flood that inundated Cagayan de Oro city, Philippines. (Erwin Mascarinas / AP) |
Entire families wiped out by Typhoon Washi; many still unaccounted for, say officials
12/17/2011
msnbc.com news services
MANILA, Philippines — Pounding rain from a tropical storm swelled rivers and sent walls of water crushing into two southern Philippine cities in the thick of night, killing at least 436 people, many caught in their beds, officials said Saturday.
Philippine Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang told The Associated Press that the latest toll was based on a body count in funeral parlors.
She said that 215 died in Cagayan de Oro and 144 in nearby Iligan cities, and the rest in several other southern and central provinces.
Most of the dead were asleep Friday night when raging floodwaters tore through their homes from swollen rivers and cascaded from mountain slopes following 12 hours of pounding rain in the southern Mindanao region.
Many of the bodies in parlors were unclaimed, indicating that entire families had perished, Pang said.
The number of missing was unclear Saturday night. Before the latest Red Cross figures, military spokesman Lt. Col. Randolph Cabangbang said about 250 people were still unaccounted for in Iligan.
Thousands of soldiers backed up by hundreds of local police, reservists, coast guard officers and civilian volunteers were mobilized for rescue and to clear a massive deluge that left the two coastal cities strewn with debris, trash, overturned vehicles and toppled trees.
Some of the dead were swept out to sea from Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, which are intersected by rivers and flanked by mountains, in a region that is unaccustomed to the typhoons that are common elsewhere in the archipelago nation.
Chief of the government's Civil Defense Office Benito Ramos attributed the high casualties in Mindanao "partly to the complacency of people because they are not in the usual path of storms" despite four days of warnings by officials of an approaching storm.
Typhoon Washi, with winds gusting up to 56 mph, hit the resource-rich island of Mindanao late on Friday, bringing heavy rain that also grounded some domestic flights and left wide areas without power.
"The death toll might still rise because there are still a lot of missing people," said Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the The Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC).
Photoblog: Storm, floods hits south Philippines
She said the hardest-hit areas were in the cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro.
Five miners were killed in a landslide in Monkayo on Mindanao and another 21 people drowned on the central island of Negros, the PNRC said.
The Philippines social welfare department said about 100,000 people were displaced and brought to more than a dozen shelters in Iligan and Cagayan de Oro.
Entire villages 'swept to the sea'
Teddy Sabuga-a, a disaster officer in Misamis Oriental province, said 60 people were rescued in waters off El Salvador city, about 6 miles northwest of Cagayan de Oro, after they were swept to the sea by a raging river, and about 120 more were rescued off Opol township, closer to the city.
He said an island in the middle of the Cagayan de Oro river was inundated, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or people missing.
Cruz said the coast guard and other rescuers were scouring the waters off his coastal city for survivors or bodies that may have been swept to the sea by a swollen river.
The floodwaters were waist-high in some neighborhoods that do not usually experience flooding. Scores of residents escaped the floods by climbing onto the roofs of their homes, Cruz said.
Army spokesman Colonel Leopoldo Galon said search and rescue operations would continue along the shorelines in Misamis Oriental and Lanao del Norte provinces.
"I can't explain how these things happened, entire villages were swept to the sea by flash floods," Galon told Reuters, saying the death toll could rise as hundreds of people were unaccounted for.
"I have not seen anything like this before. This could be worse than Ondoy," he said, referring to a 2009 storm that inundated the capital, Manila, killing hundreds of people.
Prominent radio broadcaster missing
Television images showed bodies covered in mud, cars piled on top of each other and wrecked homes. Helicopters and boats searched the sea for survivors and victims.
Those missing included prominent radio broadcaster Enie Alsonado, who was swept away while trying to save his neighbors, Cruz said.
Rep. Rufus Rodriguez of Cagayan de Oro said that about 20,000 residents of the city had been affected and that evacuees were packed in temporary shelters.
Television footage showed muddy water rushing in the streets, sweeping away all sorts of debris. Thick layers of mud coated streets where the waters had subsided. One car was shown to have been carried over a concrete fence.
The chief of the national disaster agency, Benito Ramos, said that officials were still getting reports from the field and that the number of casualties would likely rise.
"Massive flooding had been reported over the region, especially in Iligan city and Cagayan de Oro city," Ramos said, adding that tens of thousands of people sought shelter on high ground.
Strong winds toppled trees onto the rain-saturated ground in Polanco township in Zamboanga del Norte province. An 80-year-old woman drowned after being trapped in the first floor of her flooded home. A 30-year-old man and a 10-year-old boy also drowned, said provincial disaster officer Dennis Tenorio.
Washi, the 19th storm to hit the Philippines this year, came ashore in eastern Mindanao and blanketed the region with thick rain clouds 250 miles in diameter.
It quickly cut across the region overnight and was over the Sulu Sea by midmorning Saturday, packing maximum winds of 47 miles per hour and gusts of up to 56 mph. It is expected to blow out of the country late Sunday, forecaster Raymond Ordinario said.
Back-to-back typhoons in September left more than 100 people dead in the northern Philippines.
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