Rescuers embarked on the seemingly hopeless task on Saturday morning of digging for survivors of a devastating landslide that buried an entire Philippines village, leaving as many as 1 800 people dead.
Drenching rain and high winds aggravated the already wretched task of digging through the barrage of mud that swept down a mountain and engulfed Guinsaugon on the central Philippine island of Leyte on Friday morning.
A senior military officer, Lieutenant Colonel Raul Farnacio, said 19 bodies had been recovered and 57 survivors located. But the rest of the population of 1 857 was unaccounted for, with scant prospects for further recoveries. ”We presume that, more or less, 1 800 are feared dead,” he told local reporters.
Television footage showed only a few tin roofs and bits of mangled debris, some of which had been carried hundreds of metres, visible above the sludge. The village primary school was obliterated, with schoolchildren inside. The mud was 10m deep in places.
”So many died,” said a resident, Eugene Pilo, on local television. ”Our village is gone, everything was buried in mud. All the people are gone.”
Local relief teams were resuming their grim task early on Saturday, with dog teams augmenting the effort. A United States warship conducting exercises with the Philippines navy was diverted to help. Relief efforts were hampered by the very soft mud that caused rescuers to sink up to their chests.
”The troops pulled out because big boulders are cascading down the mountain,” said Farnacio, who is in charge of the military’s relief operations.
Captain Edmund Abella, part of the relief operation, said the search was extremely treacherous. Heavy equipment was almost impossible to use.
”It’s very difficult. We’re digging by hand, the place is so vast and the mud is so thick. When we try to walk, we get stuck in the mud.”
The disaster is being blamed on two weeks of heavy rain and the replacement of the deep-rooted hillside forests with coconut plantations, which have shallower roots and cannot hold soil.
Illegal logging is rampant across much of the Philippines, but it is unclear whether the clearances in this area were carried out illegally.
About 3 000 people from other villages spent Friday night in municipal buildings in the nearby town of St Bernard as heavy rain continued to lash the region.
The provincial governor, Rosette Lerias, said that, as well as the inhabitants living in Guinsaugon, which covers an area of about one square kilometre, another 1 150 lived nearby.
”I’m really afraid the death toll is going to be very high,” she said. ”There are no homes left. It is a tragedy, and we can’t do much — because even the rescuers’ lives are in danger.”
Survivors said that they were unable to do anything to stop the disaster, which struck at about 10am. ”It sounded like the mountain exploded, and the whole thing crumbled,” Dario Libatan told radio station DZMM. ”I could not see any house standing any more.”
Didita Kamarenta told Reuters: ”I felt the earth shake and a strong gust of wind, then I felt mud at my feet. All the children, including my two children, are lost. They might have been buried.”
The President of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo, said in a national television address that she was mobilising ”the full resources of the government” to help with the relief effort. ”They will come from land, sea and air,” she said. ”Hopefully you will soon be out of harm’s way.”
Local people reported an earthquake just before the landslide, but experts said that its magnitude of 2,9 was too small to have triggered the disaster alone.
Deadly landslides are not uncommon on Leyte island. In 1991, more than 5 000 people were killed in floods and landslides triggered by a typhoon. About 130 people died in similar circumstances in 1993. — Guardian Unlimited Â