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Mass burials begin in Philippine tragedy
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Mass burials begin in Philippine tragedy
Philippine villagers began to bury their dead in a mass grave on Sunday as rescuers pulled only corpses from an entombed community of 1,800 crushed under metres of mud by a landslide.
?They are being buried as we speak, 50 of them, all in the one grave,? Rosette Lerias, governor of Southern Leyte province in the central Philippines, told Reuters.
Two days after the landslide, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said mass graves, peppered with lime powder, were necessary to prevent disease spreading in the hot, fetid conditions.
?Some bodies are so bloated, they are in such a state of decomposition. But they are being buried in such a way that they can be exhumed later,? Duque told Reuters.
Rescue workers battled deep, shifting mud and recurring rain in a despairing search for 253 schoolchildren and staff buried after the elementary school in Guinsaugon, a village about 675 km (420 miles) southeast of Manila, was engulfed in Friday?s mudslide.
Unconfirmed reports that some of the pupils had sent desperate text messages initially boosted the emergency services but as light faded on Sunday, so had all hope.
By early evening, 68 bodies had been extricated from the reddish soil and a further 941 villagers were unaccounted for, a spokeswoman for the National Disaster Coordinating Council said.
In a local hospital, survivors told of jumping from roofs to safe ground to escape the torrent of mud, which was triggered by two weeks of heavy rain. One six-year-old girl clung to a coconut tree.
Tread softly </B>
Around 2,000 people from nearby villages were evacuated over the weekend as Defence Secretary Avelino Cruz warned that a similar catastrophe could strike again because rains triggered by the La Nina wet weather pattern were expected to last until June.
On Saturday night, another landslide killed 4 adults and 1 child in Zamboanga City on the southern island of Mindanao.
In Guinsaugon, hundreds of rescue workers, backed by 30 US marines dispatched from annual Philippine military exercises, were warned to tread gingerly in the soft mud or risk drowning.
Rain resumed in late afternoon and a no-fly zone was established over the area to prevent blasts of air from helicopters? rotors pushing another layer of mud over the submerged village.
?It?s like quicksand,? Adriano Fuego, Director of the Office of Civil Defense, told Reuters.
Apart from some iron sheeting, other debris and a lone hut, there was little evidence a village once stood there. Firefighters, volunteers and soldiers relied on sketches from survivors to pinpoint where the school and other buildings were.
?It?s a total disaster, just horrendous,? Lieutenant Joel Coots, a medical officer with the US Marines, told Reuters.
?It?s very difficult to get to the site because there is just acres and acres of mud and debris.?
The government and international agencies were sending supplies, but many of the emergency goods must be trucked to the devastated area on bad roads and around washed-out bridges.
Two US naval ships with 17 helicopters and nearly 1,000 soldiers were expected to arrive off the coast late on Sunday.
Taiwan has sent $100,000 and a 30-member search-and-rescue team with heat-sensing equipment to help locate survivors.
?Forty-eight hours have already passed. We are racing against the clock,? Hsin Hsing Wu, Taiwan?s ambassador to the Philippines, told Reuters.
The Philippines is hit by about 20 typhoons each year, with residents and environmental groups often blaming illegal logging or mining for making natural disasters worse.
Leyte province, where Guinsaugon is situated, is no stranger to disaster. In 1991, more than 5,000 died in floods triggered by a typhoon.
<B>Bobby Ranoco and Pedro Uchi</B>
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