Manila, Philippines—The number of dead and missing in the Philippines from catastrophic flooding and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Trami has risen to over 130, and the president said Saturday that many places remained isolated, with people in need of rescue.
Trami blasted away from the northern Philippines on Friday, killing at least 85 people and left another 41 missing in one of the Southeast Asian archipelago's deadliest and most devastating storms this year, according to the government's disaster response agency. The death toll is anticipated - grow as more reports come in from previously remote places.
Dozens of police, firemen, and other emergency services, aided by three backhoes and sniffing dogs, discovered one of the final two missing residents in the lakeside town of Talisay in Batangas province on Saturday.
A father, who was waiting for word on his missing 14-year-old daughter, sobbed as rescuers placed the remains in a black body bag. Distraught, he followed police officers as they carried the corpse bag down a mud-strewn village alley to a police vehicle, when one crying villager approached him to express her condolences.
The guy stated he was certain it was his daughter, but officials needed to authenticate the identification of the person found in the mound.
More than a dozen white coffins were set side by side in a neighboring basketball arena in the town center, carrying the bodies of those discovered in the mounds of mud, stones, and trees that cascaded Thursday afternoon down the steep slope of a forested ridge in Talisay's Sampaloc hamlet.
President Ferdinand Marcos, who inspected another hard-hit region southeast of Manila Saturday, said the unusually large volume of rainfall dumped by the storm — including in some areas that saw one to two months’ worth of rainfall in just 24 hours — overwhelmed flood controls in provinces lashed by Trami.
“The water was just too much,” Marcos told reporters.
“We’re not done yet with our rescue work,” he said. “Our problem here, there are still many areas that remained flooded and could not be accessed even big trucks.”
More than 5 million people were affected by the storm, with almost half a million fleeing to over 6,300 emergency shelters across different provinces, according to the government agency.
In an emergency Cabinet meeting, Marcos expressed alarm over predictions from official forecasts that the storm, the 11th to hit the Philippines this year, may do a U-turn next week when it is driven back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea.
The storm was expected to hit Vietnam during the weekend if it did not swerve off track.
On Friday, the Philippine government closed schools and government offices for the third day in a row to keep millions of people safe on the country's major northern island, Luzon. Inter-island ferry services were also canceled, leaving many stranded.
On Saturday, the weather cleared in several regions, allowing for cleanup operations to begin.
Every year, around 20 storms and typhoons hit the Philippines, a Southeast Asian island located between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded, killed or displaced over 7,300 people and destroyed whole communities in 2013.
