Scores killed, dozens missing in storm-ravaged Philippines

MANILA >> Nearly 100 people have died in one of the most destructive storms to lash the Philippines this year, with dozens more feared missing in a mudslide-hit mountainside village, while more than a million others were swamped by floodwater in several provinces, officials said today.

At least 53 of 98 people who died — mostly in flooding and landslides — were from Maguindanao in the Bangsamoro autonomous region, which was swamped by unusually heavy rain set off by Tropical Storm Nalgae. The storm blew out of the country and into the South China Sea on Sunday, leaving a trail of destruction in a large swath of the archipelago.

A large contingent of rescuers with bulldozers and backhoes resumed retrieval work in southern Kusiong village in the hard-hit province of Maguindanao, where as many as 80 to 100 people, including entire families, are feared to have been buried by a boulder-laden mudslide or swept away by flash floods that started overnight Thursday, said Naguib Sinarimbo, interior minister for a Muslim autonomous region run by former separatist guerrillas under a peace pact.

The government’s main disaster-response agency also reported 69 people were injured in the onslaught and that at least 63 others remain missing.

More than 1 million people were lashed by the storm, including more than 912,000 villagers who fled to evacuation centers or relatives’ homes. More than 4,100 houses and 40,180 acres of rice and other crops were damaged by floodwaters at a time when the country was bracing for a looming food crisis because of global supply disruptions, officials said.

The catastrophe in Kusiong, populated mostly by the Teduray ethnic minority group, was particularly tragic because its more than 2,000 villagers have carried out disaster-preparedness drills every year for decades to brace for a tsunami because of a deadly history. But they were not as prepared for the dangers that could come from Mount Minandar, where their village lies at the foothills, Sinarimbo said.

“When the people heard the warning bells, they ran up and gathered in a church on a high ground,” Sinarimbo said Saturday, citing accounts by Kusiong villagers.

“The problem was, it was not a tsunami that inundated them, but a big volume of water and mud that came down from the mountain,” he said.

In August 1976 an 8.1-magnitude earthquake and a tsunami in the Moro Gulf that struck around midnight left thousands of people dead and devastated coastal provinces. Senior villagers who survived the tsunami and powerful earthquake passed on the nightmarish story to their children, warning them to be prepared.

“Every year, they hold drills to brace for a tsunami. … But there wasn’t as much focus on the geo-hazards on the mountainside,” Sinarimbo said.