MANILA, 3 December 2004 — With a second typhoon pummeling the Philippine island of Luzon in a week, residents of three coastal towns yesterday sought shelter on higher ground. Typhoon Nanmadol was the second storm to hit the area this week after Winnie left over 1,000 people killed or missing.
“Based on reports from our troops in the field, they have listed 479 dead and 560 missing in three towns in Quezon province,” said military spokesman Lt. Col. Buenaventura Pascual.
A total of 131 corpses have been found in the town of General Nakar on the east coast of Luzon with about 100 residents still missing, while the town of Infanta yielded 47 dead with about 100 also missing, according to an army tally. The tally excludes 48 people who died and 38 listed as missing elsewhere on Luzon, home to nearly half the archipelago’s population of 84 million.
Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit urged the hard-hit communities quickly to bury rotting corpses recovered from under the mud and floating on the coast and along swollen rivers, to prevent epidemics.
“As much as possible, the bodies should be buried as soon as possible,” he said.
Lime has been sent to flood-hit communities to try to preserve some of the dead so they may be identified before burial but there may not be enough preservative to go around, he said.
Luzon endured the fury of Nanmadol as the cyclone killed about eight people, tore down power lines and at least one bridge and hampered rescuers trying to reach victims of Monday’s storm.
The government suspended ferry services and grounded propeller-driven aircraft across Luzon, stranding several thousand passengers as Nanmadol pummeled the eastern island of Catanduanes in mid-morning with peak winds of up to 220 km an hour.
With flying conditions treacherous and roads cut off, disaster officials said they could do little to protect thousands of people made homeless by this week’s floods and who were running short of food and drinking water.
“We are very concerned and we are not sure how we can avoid further casualties in these areas,” Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman said.
“If you go on the slopes, the ground is very loose. If you go on (lower) ground, the water can rise and you might have mudslides.”
Illegal logging was blamed for exacerbating the disaster in which the three coastal towns were devastated by a torrent of mud and logs in the wake of heavy rains. The National Disaster Coordinating Council said 37,400 families, or 168,000 people, had been affected.
The agriculture department said Monday’s storm and two others that hit the northern and central Philippines last month had caused an estimated 830 million pesos ($14.7 million) in damage to crops, livestock and fisheries.
Soliman said the government, deep in debt and struggling to cut its budget deficit, would have to spend 90 percent of the 1 billion pesos it sets aside annually for disaster relief.
Hundreds of people from the town of Real, where more than 100 people died, trudged through deep mud to try to reach higher ground before the typhoon hit. Swathes of Real and two nearby towns, mostly inhabited by fishermen and farmers, were buried under chocolate-colored mud.
