Tropical Storm Nalgae yesterday slammed into the Philippines after unleashing flash floods and landslides that left at least 45 people dead, a sharply revised official tally showed.
Nalgae pounded Luzon Island with maximum sustained winds of 95kph after making landfall on sparsely populated Catanduanes Island before dawn.
The destruction began well ahead of landfall, with heavy rain on Thursday inundating mostly rural areas on Mindanao Island in the south followed by deadly landslides and flooding on Friday.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The Philippine government revised its official death toll downward from 72 to 45 in the afternoon.
Officials said some deaths had been erroneously tallied twice from incidents in Mindanao, which accounted for 40 deaths.
The storm also killed five people elsewhere in the country.
In the past few years, flash floods with mud and debris from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by typhoons in the Philippines.
Rescue workers were focusing on the village of Kusiong, home to 80 to 100 people, which was buried after part of a denuded mountain nearby collapsed.
“Yesterday we were focused on rescue and recovered 11 bodies,” said Naguib Sinarimbo, minister of the interior of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Mindanao.
“Today we resumed our work, but this is already a retrieval operation because the village has been buried under rock and mud for more than a day,” he said, declining to say how many are feared dead.
The storm also caused flooding elsewhere in the country.
Photographs released by the Philippine Coast Guard showed rescuers using an old refrigerator as an improvised boat to pull children from a flooded community on the central island of Leyte.
The state weather service said the eye of Nalgae passed the small island of Marinduque in the morning and could hit Manila, a sprawling metropolis of more than 13 million people, later yesterday.
“Widespread flooding and rain-induced landslides are expected,” but there was “minimal to moderate risk of storm surge” or huge waves hitting coastal areas, it added.
“Based on our projections, this one is really strong, so we really prepared for it,” Philippine National Disaster Agency spokesperson Rafaelito Alejandro said, adding that 5,000 rescue teams were on standby.
He urged residents in the storm’s path to stay at home before the storm exits into the South China Sea early today.
“If it’s not necessary or important, we should avoid going out today because it is dangerous,” Alejandro said.
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