THE PHILIPPINES: Hundreds of villagers were buried in mud as they slept, after floods and landslides swept through the Philippine province of Southern Leyte at the weekend.
Rescuers worked with their bare hands and crowbars to dig out victims after the mudslides began on Friday night. Officials fear at least 200 people are dead and many more are homeless.
"The mountain just came down on them," a police officer, Dionisio Coloma, said in a radio interview from the town of Liloan. The rescue is being hampered by bad weather that has blocked roads, brought down power lines and prevented the arrival of Philippine and US army helicopters. Pounding seas around the islands of six affected provinces have made boat access perilous.
Families, including a mother embracing her children, were found dead by their neighbours. Village churches have been stacked high with coffins. "This is the worst experience we have had in years. We really have no idea of the magnitude of the disaster," said the governor of Southern Leyte, Rosette Lerias.
A week of heavy rain is being blamed for the tragedy, allegedly made worse by tree-cutting in areas above the villages. Ms Lerias, however, denied illegal logging was to blame, after touring some of the area by boat and on foot. She said the area was covered in coconut palms and the ground was saturated by rain. The mountain village of Punta in the area of San Francisco was one of the worst hit, with more than half of its 83 houses buried under mounds of earth, debris and coconut trees.
"There was mud all over; you couldn't see anything but rooftops, with the houses submerged in mud," Ms Lerias said. Nearby, an air pocket helped an 89-year-old man and a 14-year old girl survive near a pile of bodies and a Bible.
The landslides struck an area south-east of Ormoc, also in Leyte province, where landslides and flash floods killed more than 5,000 people in a few hours on November 5th, 1991. Heavy rains had fallen on hillsides denuded by rampant logging, with debris sweeping down the hillsides, leaving metres-high piles of bloated corpses.
Jun Factoran, who was secretary for the environment during the Ormoc landslides, said the area had been long ruined by logging, legal and illegal. Since 1991, the government has banned commercial logging of virgin forests, but problems of enforcement and corruption persist.
"Except now the activities of NGOs have helped create a lot more community response to logging," Mr Factoran said. "Only in those areas where local politicians are very strong can they run roughshod over the NGOs; then logging happens without consent. Everywhere else, logging is looked at as an evil." - (Guardian Service)