Storm-Triggered Floods Kill 200 People in Philippines

The number of people killed by floods and landslides caused by the tropical storm Tembin in the Philippines has reached 200, media reported on Saturday.

The storm also left dozens of people missing, the Xinhua news agency reported, according to Sputnik.

The largest number of casualties — 135 people — was registered in the Northern Mindanao region. Earlier reports said that the tropical storm, which lashed the Philippine second-largest island of Mindanao since Friday, affected more than 270,000 people.

 Most of the Tembin’s casualties were recorded in the provinces of Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur and on the Zamboanga Peninsula, the government report on storm casualties said.

According to AFP, police, soldiers and volunteers used shovels to dig through mud and debris as they searched for bodies in the village of Dalama.

“The river rose and most of the homes were swept away. The village is no longer there,” police officer Gerry Parami told AFP by telephone from nearby Tubod town.

Also on Saturday, rescuers retrieved bodies from the Salog River near the town of Sapad.

The bodies in Sapad had been swept downriver from a flooded town upstream called Salvador, Rando Salvacion, the Sapad town police chief, told AFP, while authorities in Salvador said other bodies were retrieved upstream.

It’s the latest severe meteorological event to strike the Philippines, which is beaten by numerous storms each year, making the archipelago that lies within the Pacific typhoon belt one of the world’s most disaster-prone places.

In 2013 super typhoon Haiyan killed over 7,000 people, and an estimated 200,000 families lost their homes.

H.M