Rescuers in the Philippines said the death toll from devastating mudslides triggered by typhoon rains could pass 1,000 as President Gloria Arroyo declared a state of national calamity.
As emergency workers and residents continued to dig bodies out of the thick mud, local Red Cross officials said they had confirmed 406 deaths and another 398 missing.
Senator Richard Gordon, the National Red Cross president, said he expected that the death toll could pass 1,000 as hopes faded of finding more survivors of the tragedy overnight on Thursday.
PHOTO: EPA
"We have recovered a lot of dead people and the number of missing has grown. I expect the number dead could be well over 1,000," he said.
"But the real toll may never be known," he said.
"It is important we recover as much as we can ... but at some point we have to declare closure and declare a mass grave over the area," he said in radio interviews.
Many villages have not yet reported how many residents have died.
In some cases, whole families have been buried by torrents of mud and ash unleashed by super Typhoon Durian.
The mud swept over villages perched on the slopes of the Mayon volcano.
EMERGENCY FUNDS
Arroyo declared a "state of national calamity" and authorized the immediate release of a billion pesos (US$20 million) in order to rehabilitate the areas affected by the tragedy.
She said the government will continue to mobilize its resources to try and find survivors.
She thanked foreign countries for their generous offers of aid and sympathy.
"All resources of the government will continue to be mobilized without let-up as we pin hope against hope on the search of survivors," she said in a statement.
"We need to rise up from this trial and help rebuild devastated communities and lives," she said.
Among the rescuers arriving at the scene was a five-member Spanish rescue team with a dog that was trained to sniff for bodies.
In various parts of the Bicol region, located southeast of Manila, communities have resorted to mass burials to deal with the scores of unidentifited bodies that were already beginning to decompose.
In one case, residents of the riverside town of Rawis used handtools in a desperate attempt to rescue five college students believed to be trapped in a ruined dormitory.
The Red Cross said as many as 31 villages with some 14,871 residents had been hit by the enormous mudflows.
In the eastern Bicol region over 500 villages and hamlets were affected by the storm.
ISOLATED
Many villages are still cut off and out of reach of the rescue teams.
Power, communications and water remained out of service across most of the region, further hampering rescue and relief efforts, as tales of tragedy and loss abounded.
FAMILY TRAGEDIES
At a hospital in Legaspi, Arthur Atierros tried to comfort his distraught wife, Mercy, 35, whose leg had to be amputated after the wall of their home collapsed on her.
Their nine-year-old daughter Armira stood nearby, the only one of their four children they were able to find after mud swamped their home.
Atierros, 37, said he and his relatives carried his wife for eight hours on a makeshift stretcher to the hospital.
Nearby, Adrian Bagasala was tending to his 29-year-old wife, Ivy, who also had to have her leg amputated after their house collapsed on her.
Bagasala said he dug his seven-month pregnant wife out of the mud but the strain caused her to go into labor, giving birth prematurely. The infant died soon after birth.
The disaster comes not long after thousands residents were evacuated from Mayon earlier this year amid signs that the volcano was erupting.
However the residents were allowed to return home in September after Mayon simmered down.
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