MANILA, 1 October 2006 — Typhoon Milenyo’s death toll has risen to 62 and could reach 130 as 68 more people were still reported missing, officials said yesterday.
Milenyo, which bears the international codename “Xangsane,” also caused massive destruction to infrastructure and agriculture and fisheries when it swept across metropolitan Manila and provinces south of it on Thursday.
It was the worst tropical cyclone to hit the Philippine capital in a decade, according to the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC).
Millions of people in Luzon were still without electricity yesterday and officials said restoration work would take time because many power pylons were toppled or power lines were cut by fallen trees.
As of 6 p.m. yesterday, only 67 percent of the island had their electricity supply restored, the state-run National Transmission Corp. said.
On the Bicol peninsula at Luzon’s southernmost tip, which bore the brunt of the storm, only about five percent of the electrical service had returned, the company said.
An increasingly impatient President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo yesterday ordered officials to intensify rehabilitation and cleanup of areas ravaged by the typhoon,
“We have to effect rapid normalization in Metro Manila and other areas. Rapid normalization, that is our primary goal now,” she said during a meeting of the NDCC before inspecting damage in Sorsogon, one of the worst-hit provinces in Bicol southeast of Manila.
Armed forces Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon said he deployed 2,000 soldiers to help clear the debris — fallen and uprooted trees, billboards, power pylons — in Manila.
Most of the additional fatalities were recovered in Cavite province, just outside the capital, where a mini-dam collapsed at the height of typhoon Milenyo on Thursday.
Cavite Governor Erineo Maliksi said a total of 21 people were confirmed killed during the typhoon, 19 of them swept away by the surging waters of a mini-dam that broke in General Trias town. “Some of the victims were recovered at sea by coast guard and navy rescuers,” he said, adding that a total of 13,375 houses were destroyed by the typhoon.
Seven other people remained missing in the General Trias incident, Maliksi said.
The governor said the two other fatalities in Cavite were caused by falling trees in Rosario town. Aside from Cavite, the eastern province of Quezon and adjacent province of Laguna accounted for 44 fatalities.
The remaining 29 victims were from Manila, Bicol region, Bulacan, Bataan, Antique, Iloilo, Leyte and Negros Oriental. Most of the dead were drowned, buried by landslides, hit by fallen trees and debris or electrocuted.
At its peak, Milenyo packed sustained winds of up to 130 kilometers per hour.
Anthony Golez, deputy director of the Office of the Civil Defense (OCD), said the death toll would likely continue to rise because reports had yet to arrive from far-flung areas.
“Our figures are still very fluid because reports on the effects of the typhoon in some areas have not yet come in,” he said.
Golez said that in the eastern province of Quezon, among the hardest-hit, some communities badly damaged by the typhoon had not yet been reached by rescuers.
“Yesterday we dispatched an aerial survey in Quezon. There were many houses destroyed, but our helicopter was forced to return because of strong winds and heavy rains, so we were not able to assess the situation in these communities,” he said.
A “state of calamity” had been declared in the capital region, Cavite province and several other areas, authorizing the release of funds for relief and rehabilitation, the civil defense office said.
More than 90,000 people remained unable to return to their homes due to continued flooding and the risk of landslides from rain-saturated hills, the office added.
Repair crews, helped by the military, worked through the night to clear roads and restore power lines after the storm knocked down hundreds of trees, electrical posts and billboards. Traffic in many parts of the city was snarled by the fallen debris.
Relief and rescue operations were hampered by massive power outages in affected areas.
Meanwhile, the government’s chief weather forecaster, Nathaniel Cruz, warned that a new tropical depression was spotted in the eastern Philippines, and its effects might be felt Wednesday or Thursday. (Additional input from Agencies)
