MANILA, 19 February 2006 — The overall death toll from the massive mudslide in the Philippine farming village of Guinsaugon was feared yesterday to climb to 1,800 — nearly every man, woman and child. The village was covered with mud up to 10 meters (30 feet) deep when the slope of a mountain collapsed in a wall of earth and boulders Friday after two weeks of heavy rains.
Hoping for a wonder, rescue efforts focused yesterday on finding life in an elementary school with some 250 students and teachers inside. But reports that survivors sent cell phone text messages from inside the school went unconfirmed, leaving the search effort dispirited and empty handed.
As rain continued to fall yesterday, and fearing more landslides in the area, 11 villages were evacuated. Rescue workers were warned to tread carefully or risk becoming casualties themselves as the uneasy mud settled.
The situation was so delicate that a no-fly zone was established over the disaster area out of fears that powerful blasts of air from the helicopter’s rotors could send the mud oozing again.
Medical supplies and excavation equipment were reaching the area on Leyte island, and US military ships steamed to the scene to add 1,000 Marines to the aid effort. But with no survivors found yesterday, it increasingly looked as though the operation was about recovering bodies rather than providing relief.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo mentioned reports about cell phone messages sent by survivors in the swamped school during a televised staff meeting on the disaster. The reports gave impetus to the military to dispatch 60 soldiers to the scene.
But as day turned to night, no signs of life were found, and officials admitted that they had been unable to confirm the existence of any genuine text messages from survivors.
Staff Sgt. Bienvenido Plaza of the Air Force Rescue Group said rescue workers shouted and used stones to bang on boulders in hopes that survivors would hear. There was only silence, he said.
Still, provincial Gov. Rosette Lerias said she was hoping for “a miracle” and that sniffer dogs would be sent to the school today.
“I would like to believe it’s true,” she said. “I am giving it the benefit of the doubt, and that is why we are concentrating on the school building.”
There wasn’t much else left to concentrate on. Survivors and relatives of the missing had trouble even figuring out where houses once stood in the 40-hectare (100-acre) stretch of mud. Soldiers, firefighters and volunteers were given sketches of the village as it stood just days ago, but all the landmarks had been wiped away.
“It’s hard to find the houses now,” said Eunerio Bagaipo, a 42-year-old farmer who lost two brothers, almost 20 nieces and nephews and a number of in-laws. “There is nothing now, just earth and mud.”
The search was complicated by heavy morning downpours, the threat that the mountain remained unstable and the possibility that 750 troops, firefighters and volunteers could get sucked down into the soft, shifting mud.
— With input from agencies
