The Philippines yesterday set to work clearing debris, reconnecting power and rebuilding flattened houses after a typhoon swept across the country killing 38 people, with at least eight missing, rescue officials said.
Typhoon Rammasun, the strongest storm to hit the Philippines this year, was heading northwest toward China after cutting a path across the main island of Luzon, shutting down the capital and knocking down trees and power lines, causing widespread blackouts.
The storm destroyed about 7,000 houses and damaged 19,000, National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council Chief Undersecretary Alexander Pama, said. More than 530,000 people had taken refuge in evacuation centers, according to official figures.
Photo: EPA
Pama put the damage to crops, mostly rice and corn, from the Bicol region, southeast of Manila and the first to be hit by the storm, at about 668 million pesos (US$15.3 million).
Most schools remained closed in the capital and southern Luzon, the most densely populated part of the country with about 17 million people. Power had been restored to just more than half of the Luzon grid, a transmission agency official said.
Manila Electric Co said that a third of its 1.88 million customers were without power.
Disaster officials were assessing damage, but the coconut-growing Quezon province south of Manila appears to have borne the brunt of Rammasun, which intensified into a category 3 typhoon as it crossed the country.
The cyclone is expected to make landfall in China around midday today somewhere between the island of Hainan and the southern province of Guangdong, the Hainan government said on its Web site, adding that fishing boats had been told to return to port.
China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs has already put authorities on alert across a swathe of the nation’s south and southwest to deal with expected damage, especially as torrential rain across a large part of the southern region has killed 34 in the past week.
Tropical Storm Risk, which monitors cyclones, downgraded Rammasun to a category 1 storm on a scale of one to five.
However, it forecast that the storm would gain in strength to category two within 24 hours, picking up energy from the warm sea.
Quezon Governor David Suarez said the Philippine province was preparing to declare a state of calamity. He said officials had confirmed seven people died in the province.
“Last night we had difficulty going around because many trees and fallen poles are blocking highways and roads,” Suarez said in a radio interview.
Pama said on Wednesday the government was more prepared after the devastation caused by Super Typhoon Haiyan in November, evacuating people at risk in coastal and landslide-prone areas well before the typhoon made landfall.
Parts of the Philippines are still recovering from Haiyan, which killed more than 6,100 people.
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