Death toll in Philippine storm rises to 100

MANILA, Philippines: Rescuers in the Philippines were diving into a lake and scouring isolated villages on Sunday to locate dozens of missing people as the death toll from Tropical Storm Trami hit 100.

Trami, which rammed into the Philippines on October 24, was among the deadliest storms to hit the Southeast Asian country this year.

According to the national disaster agency, it forced more than half a million people to flee their homes and at least 36 people remain missing.

Police in the hardest-hit Bicol region have recorded 38 deaths, most due to drowning.

“We are still receiving many calls and we are trying to save as many people as we can,” Bicol regional police director Andre Dizon told AFP.

“Hopefully, there will be no more deaths.”

Dizon added that “many residents” in the region’s Camarines Sur province are still trapped on roofs and the upper floors of their homes.

The death toll in Batangas, south of Manila, has risen to 55, provincial police chief Jacinto Malinao told AFP.

Two were reported dead in separate incidents of electrocution and drowning in Cavite province, police said.

Five more bodies were recovered in other provinces, bringing the total to 100, according to an AFP tally based on official police and disaster agency sources.

“A higher death toll is possible in the coming days since rescuers can now reach previously isolated places,” Edgar Posadas of the Civil Defence Office told AFP.

The police, coast guards and a Marines diving team were searching on Sunday for a family of seven at Taal Lake in Batangas.

“The waters from the mountains hit their home in Balete town, causing it to be swept away with them possibly inside,” Malinao, the provincial police chief, said.

Most of the deaths in Batangas have been attributed to rain-induced landslides.

More than 20 bodies were pulled from heaps of mud, boulders and fallen trees, while police said at least another 20 people in the province are still missing.

“We will continue searching until all bodies are retrieved,” Malinao said.

The national disaster agency said Sunday that about 560,000 people had been displaced by floods, which submerged hundreds of villages in swaths of the northern Philippines.

About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the archipelago nation or its surrounding waters each year, damaging homes and infrastructure and killing dozens of people.

A recent study showed that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change.