The government’s major disaster response agency also said 69 people were injured and at the very least 63 others were missing.
The storm lashed greater than 1.9 million people, including greater than 975,000 rural residents who fled to evacuation centers or the homes of relatives. Officials say greater than 4,100 homes and 16,260 hectares (40,180 acres) of rice and other crops have been damaged by floods because the country braces for a looming food crisis because of global supply disruptions.
Sinarimbo said the official list of missing individuals didn’t include most of those feared to be missing in the huge mudslide that hit Kusiong because entire families can have been buried and no members remained to offer names to authorities. and details.
The disaster in Kusiong, inhabited mainly by the Teduray ethnic minority, was particularly tragic since the village’s greater than 2,000 residents have conducted disaster preparedness drills yearly for many years to arrange for tsunamis because of its deadly history. But they weren’t as prepared for the hazards that would come from Mount Minandar, where their village lies on the foot, Sinarimbo said.
“When people heard the warning bells, they ran and gathered at the church on the hill,” Sinarimbo said on Saturday, citing accounts from Kusiong villagers.
“The problem was that it wasn’t the tsunami that sunk them, but large amounts of water and mud that flowed down from the mountain.”
In August 1976, the 8.1-magnitude Moro Gulf earthquake and tsunami that hit around midnight killed 1000’s of individuals and devastated coastal provinces in one in all the deadliest natural disasters in Philippine history.
Situated between Moro Gulf and the 446-meter-high Mount Minandar, Kusiong was one in all the worst affected by the 1976 disaster. The village never forgot this tragedy. Elderly villagers who survived the tsunami and big earthquake passed on this nightmare story to their children, warning them to be prepared.
“They conduct drills every year to prepare for tsunamis. Someone was assigned to ring the alarm bells and high areas were designated for people to flee to,” Sinarimbo said. “Even villagers were taught the sounds of an approaching big wave based on the memories of tsunami survivors.”
“But there hasn’t been as much attention focused on geographic hazards on mountain slopes,” he said.
Bulldozers, excavators and other heavy equipment were delivered to Kusiong on Saturday together with greater than 100 rescuers from the military, police and volunteers from other provinces, but they were unable to dig in what survivors described because the church’s location due to the muddy development. Officials said the mound was still dangerously soft.
Stormy weather across a large swath of the country hampered transportation as hundreds of thousands of Filipinos planned to travel over the long weekend to go to relatives’ graves and attend family reunions on All Saints’ Day within the mostly Roman Catholic country.
Nearly 200 domestic and international flights were canceled, Manila’s international airport was briefly closed because of stormy weather, and travel in rough seas was prohibited by the Coast Guard, trapping 1000’s of passengers.
Waters flooded many provinces and cities, trapping some people on their roofs. During a televised meeting on Saturday with disaster relief officials, President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr expressed disappointment on the high death toll.
“We should have done better,” said Marcos Jnr. “We were unable to predict that the amount of water would be so large, so we were unable to warn people and then evacuate them off the road ahead of the approaching flash flood.”
About 20 typhoons and storms hit the Philippine archipelago yearly. It is situated on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a region along much of the Pacific Ocean where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur, making the country some of the disaster-prone on the planet.
