At least 144 people were killed as Tropical Storm Ketsana battered a wide area in the Philippines, dumping record rainfall on the capital and causing the worst flooding on record in 40 years, officials said yesterday.
Rescuers plucked bodies from muddy floodwaters and saved drenched survivors from rooftops.
It was the region’s worst flooding in more than four decades. The government declared a “state of calamity” in metropolitan Manila and 25 storm-hit provinces.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Ketsana roared across the northern Philippines on Saturday, dumping more than a month’s worth of rain in just 12 hours. The resulting landslides and flooding have left at least 83 people dead and 23 others missing, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro said.
Many parts of the capital remained flooded yesterday, although waters were fast receding.
TV footage shot from military helicopter showed drenched survivors still marooned on top of half-submerged passenger buses and rooftops in the suburbs of Manila. Some dangerously clung on high-voltage power lines while others plodded through waist-high flood waters.
Authorities deployed rescue teams on boats to save survivors sighted during the aerial check.
More than 330,000 people were affected by the storm, including some 59,000 people who were brought to about 100 schools, churches and other evacuation shelters, officials said.
The “state of calamity” declaration allowed officials to utilize emergency funds for relief and rescue.
Teodoro said that so far, army troops, police and civilian volunteers have rescued more than 5,100 people.
Many residents lost all their belongings in the storm, but were thankful they were alive.
“We’re back to zero,” Marikina resident Ronald Manlangit said.
Still he expressed relief that he managed to move all his children to the second floor of his house on Saturday as floodwaters engulfed the ground floor.
Mud covered everything — cars, the road and vegetables in a public market near Manlangit’s house.
Governor Joselito Mendoza of Bulacan Province, north of the capital, said it was tragic that “people drowned in their own houses” as the storm raged.
The most recently reported fatalities included nine people in Bulacan, most of them drowned. A landslide in northern Pampanga Province killed 12 villagers. An army soldier and four militiamen drowned while trying to rescue villagers in southern Laguna Province.
In the city of Marikina near Manila, a rescuer gingerly lifted the mud-covered body of a child from a boat. Rescuers carried away four other bodies, including that of a woman found in a church, after a search in a flooded neighborhood.
Distress calls and e-mails from thousands of residents in metropolitan Manila and their worried relatives flooded TV and radio stations overnight. Ketsana swamped entire towns, set off landslides and shut down Manila’s airport for several hours.
“My son is sick and alone. He has no food and he may be waiting on the roof of his house. Please get somebody to save him,” a weeping housewife, Mary Coloma, told radio DZBB.
The sun shone briefly in Manila yesterday and showed the extent of devastation in many neighborhoods — destroyed houses, overturned vans and cars, and streets and highways covered in debris and mud.
The 42.4cm of rain that swamped metropolitan Manila in just 12 hours on Saturday exceeded the 39.2cm average for the entire month, chief government weather forecaster Nathaniel Cruz said, adding that the rainfall broke the previous record of 33.4cm in a 24-hour period in June 1967.
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