International   

Hundreds feared killed as village is wiped out

Survivors unlikely in Philippines landslip

MANILA: Eugene Pilo's wife and children are gone; so are almost all of his friends and neighbours.

In just a matter of seconds, the mountain that loomed over his village took them in a rush of mud and boulders that smashed and covered everything in its path.

``What happened was horrendous,'' Mr. Pilo told GMA television on Friday, hours after the landslip engulfed Guinsaugon village on Leyte island, 670 km southeast of Manila. ``So many died. Our village is gone, everything was buried in mud. All the people are gone.'' Mr. Pilo was at his brother's house when they felt the ground shake just before 10 a.m. (0200 GMT). ``Then the landslips struck,'' he recalled. ``I ran out in the street, but I fell to the ground, along with my brother. There were big boulders — bigger than a house — and logs which rushed down.''

The fate of loved ones was far too clear. ``We left the bodies there because it was dangerous to stay there,'' Mr. Pilo said.

Survivor Dario Libatan said he believed his wife and three children were killed. ``It sounded like the mountain exploded, and the whole thing crumbled,'' Mr. Libatan told Manila radio DZMM. ``I could not see any house standing anymore.'' The Philippine Red Cross' estimates of 200 death and 1,500 missing seemed premature — until the first TV footage of the scene aired. Guinsaugon was simply gone, with few signs that the village of 2,500 persons had ever existed.

The landslip also affected two other nearby villages.

Rescue workers, dwarfed by a vast brown landscape that sharply contrasted with the bright green of nearby rice paddies, were seen desperately seeking signs of life beneath mud up to 30 ft deep.

Sometimes they were lucky. They pulled a dazed child from the suffocating mud, then a woman. But as the day ended, only 53 survivors had been reported.

``We did not find injured people,'' said Ricky Estela, a crewman on a helicopter that flew a politician to the scene. ``Most of them are dead and beneath the mud.''

Disaster-prone island

Some of the Philippines' worst disasters — and one of the country's biggest moments in history — have involved Leyte, one of the largest of the archipelago's 7,100 islands.

Leyte etched its place in history after it was chosen by Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the beachhead for his return to the Philippines, a former U.S. colony, to liberate the country from Japanese troops in 1944.

The famous October 20, 1944, Leyte landing by MacArthur fulfilled his ``I shall return'' promise to the Philippines, and preceded the October 22-27 Battle of Leyte Gulf that involved more than 730 ships in one of history's largest naval battles.

Leyte's most famous daughter, former first lady Imelda Marcos, said she entertained MacArthur and liberation troops by singing for them. More recently, the island has been linked to disasters, both natural and manmade.

In December 1987, the ferry MV Dona Paz — carrying passengers from Leyte and nearby Samar island to Manila — sank after colliding with a fuel tanker in the central Philippines, killing 4,340 persons. It was considered the worst peacetime shipping disaster.

In October the following year, the Paz's sister ship, Dona Marilyn, which was sailing from Manila to Leyte, sank during a typhoon, killing about 250 persons.

Tragedy struck the island again in November 1991 when a flash flood swept down from the hills into Ormoc city on the western side of Leyte, killing about 6,000 persons. A landslip in San Francisco, in southern Leyte province in December 2003, killed 133 persons.

The island, about 560 km southeast of Manila, is in the path of most of the typhoons that sweep from the Southern Pacific to the Philippines, and its southern portion experiences rainfall most of the year. — AP

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

LTTE team leaves for Geneva talks
Hamas faces economic stranglehold
U.K. judge condemns detenu torture
Against undue reflection
Hundreds feared killed as village is wiped out
E.U. opens up service industries
Oil firms must leave Nigeria, say rebels
Thar Express flagged off in Karachi amid fanfare

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu