Rescuers struggled through mud and pounding rain today to clear mountain roads and retrieve more than 160 bodies from dozens of landslides that buried villages and cut off towns in the rain-soaked northern Philippines.
The latest calamity brought the death toll to more than 450 from the Philippines' worst flooding in 40 years after back-to-back storms started pounding the north of the country on 26 September.
More than 160 people were killed in landslides in Benguet and Mountain Province along the Cordillera mountain range, about 125 miles (200km) north of Manila, officials in the two provinces said. The fatalities included 120 in Benguet, governor Nestor Fongwan said, while 23 died in Mountain Province, according to governor Max Dalog. A further 25 people died in Baguio, city relief administrator Peter Fianza said.
Landslides blocked the roads to the mountain city of Baguio in the heart of the Cordillera region. The only way to reach the isolated mountain communities was by foot, with military helicopters unable to fly because of the storms, said Lt Col Ernesto Torres, spokesman for the government's disaster relief agency.
"We are focused on rescue at this time," he said. "It is raining nonstop."
About 100 landslides have struck the region since the weekend, said Rex Manuel, another relief official.
Seventeen bodies have been recovered so far from Kibungan village in Benguet's La Trinidad township, which was almost entirely buried in mud and debris yesterday. Up to 40 villagers were estimated to have died, while more than 100 were moved to safety.
Rescuers in the hillside villages used pulleys to transport the dead they retrieved from a pile of rubble and mud.
TV footage showed the bodies arriving in black bags in a hall in Baguio, where relatives wept. "There was a sudden rumble above us, and then the houses at the bottom were gone, including them," said Melody Coronel, pointing to the relatives she found among the dead.
In Buyagan village, also in La Trinidad, only three out of about 100 houses remained visible after Thursday night's landslide buried most structures there. Some 50 residents were saved, but it was not clear how many died, Manuel said.
In neighbouring Mountain Province's Tadian township, at least 28 people were reported missing and several bodies were recovered after the side of a mountain collapsed.
Another landslide hit a second village in Tadian early Friday. No immediate casualty reports were available.
Forecasters said tropical depression Parma was still lingering off the north-eastern coast and dumped rain overnight. It hit land more than a week ago, the second major storm to hit the country in two weeks.
Thousands of residents of coastal Pangasinan province, about 105 miles (170km) north of Manila, were rescued from rooftops after dams released excess water from recent heavy rains, inundating 30 out of 46 towns along the Agno River.
"There was really heavy rain, so water had to be released from the dam, otherwise it would have been more dangerous," said the government's chief forecaster Nathaniel Cruz. "Even our office was flooded and our staff had to move to the rooftop. It's near the river that they were monitoring."The government's disaster relief agency said it had requested that the US embassy redeploy hundreds of American troops from the massive clean-up in and around the capital, Manila, to the flood-hit areas in the north.
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