Death toll rises to 76
\nBicol
\nHomeowners in the northern Philippines used spades and rakes to clear out debris left by Tropical Storm Trami on Friday while rescuers trawled through thick mud looking for the missing as the death toll rose to 76.
\nTens of thousands of people were displaced by floods fueled by a torrential downpour that dumped two months\u2019 worth of rain over just two days in some areas.
\n\u201cMany are still trapped on the roofs of their homes and asking for help,\u201d Andre Dizon, police director for the hard-hit Bicol region, told AFP. \u201cWe are hoping that the floods will subside today since the rain has stopped.\u201d
\nBut accessibility remained a major issue for rescuers Friday, particularly in Bicol, President Ferdinand Marcos said.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s the problem we\u2019re having with Bicol, so difficult to penetrate,\u201d he said, adding that the heavily saturated ground led to \u201clandslides in areas that didn\u2019t have landslides before.\u201d
\nIn Laurel, a scenic town nestled near volcanic Lake Taal south of the capital Manila, AFP reporters saw roads blocked by felled trees, vehicles half-submerged in mud and homes severely damaged by flash flooding.
\n\u201cWe saw washing machines, cars, home equipment, roofs being swept away,\u201d Mimie Dionela, 56, told AFP.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re lucky (the rain) happened in the morning, for sure many would\u2019ve died if it happened at night,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was indescribable how scared we were.\u201d
\nIslao Malabanan, 63, agreed he was alive only because the flood occurred during daytime, but said his family had lost everything \u201cincluding our clothes\u201d.
\nJona Maulion, who started an auto repair business in Laurel less than a year ago, questioned if her family could afford to restart from scratch.
\n\u201cWe thought we were on the way to success in the business,\u201d the 47-year-old said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that this would happen, everything is gone.\u201d
\nAs Trami departed the Philippines in the early hours, travelling west over the South China Sea, the storm\u2019s death toll was swelling as fresh reports of victims emerged.
\nIn Batangas province south of Manila, the number of confirmed dead had risen to 43, provincial police chief Jacinto Malinao told AFP.
\nLaurel and the nearby towns of Talisay and Agoncillo accounted for most of the dead in Batangas, with 16 others missing in Talisay, he added.
\n\u201cThe greatest challenge here really is the thick mud. In our location, the mud is about 10 feet (three metres) high with debris and boulders, Malinao said.
\n\u201cHopefully, there will be no rain in the coming days so we can find the bodies fast.\u201d
\nPolice in the Bicol region on Friday reported 29 deaths, while four other bodies were found elsewhere.
\nAt his morning press briefing, President Marcos noted that the Bicol cities of Naga and Legazpi had reported \u201cmany casualties, but we haven\u2019t been able to get in yet\u201d.
\nGovernment offices and schools across the main island of Luzon remained shuttered Friday, but storm surge warnings were cancelled along the west coast as Trami flew farther out to sea.
\nState weather agency specialist Jofren Habaluyas told AFP that Batangas province had seen \u201ctwo months\u2019 worth of rain\u201d, or 391.3 millimetres, fall over October 24 and 25.
\nAn official tally late Thursday reported nearly 320,000 people evacuated in the face of flooding that turned streets into rivers and half-buried some towns in sludge-like volcanic sediment set loose by the storm.
\nRescuers in Naga city and Nabua municipality used boats to reach residents stranded on rooftops, many of whom sought assistance via Facebook posts.
\nThe search for a missing fisherman whose boat sunk in the waters off Bulacan province west of Manila, meanwhile, remained suspended Friday due to strong currents, the local disaster office said.
\nAbout 20 big storms and typhoons hit the Philippines or its surrounding waters each year, damaging homes and infrastructure and killing dozens of people.
\nA recent study showed that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Death toll rises to 76 Bicol Homeowners in the northern Philippines used spades and rakes to clear out debris left by Tropical Storm Trami on Friday while rescuers trawled through thick mud looking for the missing as the death toll rose to 76. Tens of thousands of people were displaced by floods fueled by a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":72068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72105,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72092\/revisions\/72105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}