Christmas Day floods in the Philippines forced the evacuation of nearly 46,000 people from their homes, civil defense officials said yesterday.
Eight people were killed and 19 others were missing after a week’s worth of heavy seasonal rain in the southern and eastern regions of the country, they said in an updated report.
The flooding hit the south on Sunday, as the disaster dampened celebrations on the mainly Catholic nation’s most important holiday.
Photo: Handout / Philippine Coast Guard / AFP
“The waters rose above the chest in some areas, but today the rains have ceased,” civil defense worker Robinson Lacre said by telephone from Gingoog, which accounted for 33,000 of the 45,700 people evacuated from their homes.
The Philippine Coast Guard said it rescued members of more than two dozen families in the southern city of Ozamiz and nearby Clarin at the height of the flooding.
Photographs released by the coast guard showed its orange-clad rescuers cradling toddlers plucked from homes at night in waist-deep floodwaters.
Four deaths — three from drowning — were reported in the nearby southern towns of Jimenez and Tudela.
The coast guard also said that strong winds and big waves sank a fishing boat on Christmas Day off the coast of the central island of Leyte. Two crew members were killed, while six others were rescued.
Two people, including a baby girl, drowned in the eastern towns of Libmanan and Tinambac after they were hit by floods several days before Christmas, the civil defense office said.
Nineteen people remain missing, most of them subsistence fishers from the country’s Pacific seaboard who put to sea despite rough conditions days before Christmas.
The weather turned bad as the disaster-prone nation of 110 million people prepared for a long Christmas holiday.
Millions of people travel to their hometowns for family reunions during this period.
The Philippines is ranked among the most vulnerable nations to the effects of climate change.
Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS