Residents of flooded farming villages in the Philippines yesterday were trapped on their rooftops and animals floated down fast-rising rivers, as Typhoon Koppu dumped more intense rain.
Koppu, the second-strongest storm to hit the disaster-plagued Southeast Asian archipelago this year, has killed at least two people and forced more than 60,000 people from their homes, authorities said.
After making landfall on Sunday morning on the east coast of Luzon, the typhoon has brought heavy rain to some of the nation’s most important farming areas.
Photo: Reuters
“I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s the worst flood I’ve seen in my entire life,” farmer Reynaldo Ramos, 68, said as he walked through knee-deep water in Santa Rosa, about two hours’ drive north of Manila.
Military, government and volunteer rescue units equipped with rubber boats were trying to help residents in dozens of flooded villages, said Nigel Lontoc, a regional rescue official.
“The floods are rising fast and some people are now on their rooftops,” Lontoc said, adding there were not enough rescuers and he did not know how many have been rescued.
Photo: AFP
Lontoc said many thousands of people may be stranded in those villages, although it was too early to determine an exact number.
Authorities confirmed at least two people had died because of the storm, but the death toll is expected to rise as full accounts from badly hit villages are gathered.
The storm is forecast to continue dumping heavy rains across the Philippines until tomorrow.
In Santa Rosa, water buffalo, pigs, goats, dogs, washing machines and furniture lined the sides of a storm-tossed highway, where about 200 residents had been seeking refuge from the floods since Sunday night.
Jun Paddayuman, 27, in shorts and a sleeveless white undershirt caked with mud up to his chest, pointed to his nearby house, where flood waters had risen to the roof.
“The waters arrived suddenly. We did not expect it at all,” he said.
Paddayuman said, when the waters first appeared in his house, he waded to the highway carrying his eight-month pregnant wife and leading his three-year-old son by the hand. He said he had seen geese, chicken and dogs being carried off by the rampaging waters.
Nearby, two men pushed pigs placed on top of truck tire inner tubes through chest-deep floods in a valient attempt to save their hog farm.
Wide expanses of rice paddies had disappeared under torrents of knee-deep water throughout the towns and villages north of Manila because of runoff from torrential rain unleashed by Koppu on nearby mountain ranges.
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