The death toll from Typhoon Kalmaegi in the central Philippines yesterday climbed past 100 as the devastating impact on Cebu province became clearer after the worst flooding in recent memory.
Floodwaters described as unprecedented had rushed through the province’s towns and cities a day earlier, sweeping away cars, riverside shanties and even massive shipping containers.
Cebu spokesman Rhon Ramos said that 35 bodies had been recovered from flooded areas of Liloan, a town that is part of the metro area of the provincial capital, Cebu City.
Photo: Reuters
The grim news brought the toll for Cebu to 76, while on neighboring Negros Island, at least 12 people were dead and 12 more were missing after Kalmaegi’s driving rain loosened volcanic mudflow, which buried homes in Canlaon City, police Lieutenant Stephen Polinar said.
“Eruptions of Kanlaon volcano since last year deposited volcanic material on its upper sections. When the rain fell, those deposits rumbled down onto the villages,” he said.
Only one Negros death had been included in an earlier government tally of 17 deaths outside Cebu.
Photo: Reuters
That figure included six crewmembers of a military helicopter that crashed while on a typhoon relief mission.
“Around four or five in the morning, the water was so strong that you couldn’t even step outside,” Reynaldo Vergara, 53, said yesterday, adding that everything in his small shop in Mandanaue had been lost when a nearby river overflowed.
“Nothing like this has ever happened. The water was raging,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
In nearby Talisay, where an informal settlement along a riverbank was washed away, 26-year-old Regie Mallorca was already at work rebuilding his home.
“This will take time because I don’t have the money yet. It will take months,” he said as he mixed cement and sand atop the rubble.
The area around Cebu City was deluged with 18.3cm of rain in the 24 hours before Kalmaegi’s landfall, well over its 13.1cm monthly average, weather specialist Charmagne Varilla said.
Cebu Governor Pamela Baricuatro on Tuesday called the situation “unprecedented” and “devastating.”
Nearly 800,000 people were moved from the typhoon’s path.
The catastrophic loss of life in Cebu comes as the public seethes over a scandal involving so-called ghost flood-control projects believed to have cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
“You begin to ask the question why we’re having terrible flash floods here when you have 26.6 billion pesos [US$452.32 million] for flood control projects” in the national budget, Baricuatro said in an interview with local outlet ABS-CBN.
“Definitely we have seen projects here ... that I would say are ghost projects,” she said.
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