TALISAY, Philippines — The number of people killed or missing in massive flooding and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Trami in the Philippines has surpassed 100. The president stated on Saturday that numerous areas remained isolated, and people require rescue.
Trami departed from the northwestern Philippines on Friday, resulting in at least 81 deaths and 34 missing persons, making it one of the deadliest and most destructive storms to hit the Southeast Asian archipelago this year, according to the government’s disaster response agency. As reports arrive from previously isolated areas, the death toll is expected to rise.
On Saturday, dozens of police officers, firefighters, and other emergency personnel, aided by three backhoes and sniffer dogs, searched for one of the last two missing villagers in the lakeside town of Talisay in Batangas province.
A father, awaiting news about his missing 14-year-old daughter, wept as rescuers placed the remains in a black body bag. He followed police officers, who carried the body bag down a mud-strewn village alley to a police van, while a weeping resident approached him to offer condolences.
The man expressed certainty that the remains belonged to his daughter, but authorities needed to conduct checks to confirm the identity of the villager discovered in the mound.
In a nearby basketball gym at the town center, more than a dozen white coffins were arranged side by side, containing the remains of those found in the mounds of mud, boulders, and trees that cascaded down the steep slope of a wooded ridge in Talisay’s Sampaloc village on Thursday afternoon.
President Ferdinand Marcos, who inspected another severely affected region southeast of Manila on Saturday, said the unusually heavy rainfall caused by the storm, including some areas receiving one to two months’ worth of rainfall in just 24 hours, overwhelmed flood controls in provinces battered 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.”
His administration, Marcos said, would plan to start work on a major flood control project that can meet the unprecedented threats posed by climate change.
More than 4.2 million people were in the path of the storm, including nearly half a million, who mostly fled to more than 6,400 emergency shelters in several provinces, the government agency said.
In an emergency cabinet meeting, Marcos expressed concerns regarding reports from government forecasters that the storm, the 11th to hit the Philippines this year, could make a U-turn next week as it is pushed back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea.
The storm was forecast to batter Vietnam over the weekend if it would not veer off course.
The Philippine government shut down schools and government offices for the third day on Friday to keep millions of people safe on the main northern island of Luzon. Inter-island ferry services were also suspended, stranding thousands.
Weather has cleared in many areas on Saturday, allowing cleanup work in most areas.
Each year, about 20 storms and typhoons batter the Philippines, a Southeast Asian archipelago which lies between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing and flattened entire villages.