Tropical storm lashes Philippines, at least 45 dead

DATU ODIN SINSUAT, Philippines: Severe Tropical Storm Nalgae pounded the Philippines on Saturday after unleashing flash floods and landslides that officials said left at least 45 people dead.

Nalgae churned across the archipelago nation´s main island of Luzon with winds of up to 95-km an hour after making landfall on the sparsely populated eastern island of Catanduanes before dawn.

It has sparked heavy rains across the country, with areas far from the path of the storm inundated including the southern island of Mindanao, which has seen flooding and deadly landslides over the past two days.

A sharply revised official toll on Saturday put the number of deaths on Mindanao at 40, with five others killed elsewhere in the country.

At least 17 people were missing, while nearly 20,000 had been evacuated.

In the Mindanao village of Kusiong, home to around 100 people, bulldozers and backhoes attempted to remove a thick layer of limestone rock and mud after parts of a nearby mountain collapsed on Friday. Fourteen people have so far been pulled from the debris and more are still missing in the community.

“Had she died of illness it would have been less painful,” villager Mercedes Mocadef told AFP as she stood by three bodies, one of which turned out to be the daughter of her cousin.

The dead girl´s mother was also lost in the disaster.

Landslides and flash floods originating from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by typhoons in the Philippines in recent years. “It could be more than a hundred,” Lester Sinsuat, mayor in the nearby town of Datu Odin Sinsuat, told AFP when asked how many were feared dead.

Regional civil defence chief Naguib Sinarimbo said “this is already a retrieval operation because the village (Kusiong) has been buried under rock and mud for more than a day”.