Mudslide rescue hopes fade
Monday February 20 2006
Nick Meo
in Manila
RESCUERS at the village entombed under mud struggled yesterday to dig through to a school where hundreds of children are feared buried.
"They have reached the rooftop of the school building," Congressman Roger Mercado said yesterday as the search ceased for the night. "They will continue to dig and listen for sounds beneath."
And ten more people were feared dead in a second landslide in another part of the Philippines.
Hope of finding survivors in the farming village of Guinsaugon had almost vanished by nightfall, more than 48 hours after a mountainside saturated by days of rain collapsed, burying most of its 1,800 inhabitants under mud that is more than 25 metres deep in places.
Disaster
The final death toll could prove to be much higher, with some estimates suggesting that 3,000 people may have been in the village at the time of the disaster.
By last night, there had been no sign of life since mobile phone text messages were apparently sent from under the mud on Friday night.
"I don't think we can find anybody alive," Felix Lim, the deputy mayor of St Bernard, which includes the village, said: "The mud is just too deep.
"That's the hard truth we have to face."
Shay O'Farrell from Dublin, was among the many volunteers to help in the rescue operation. The rescue effort has been severely hampered by the remoteness of the village, seven hours' drive from the nearest airport, and by weather that has kept military helicopters grounded for much of the time.
The ten people missing and thought to be dead in the second landslide are from the village of Balabag, in the southern island of Mindanao.
A British man, named by the AFP news agency as Trevor White, was believed to have been in Guinsaugon at the time of the disaster.
The Foreign Office confirmed that a Briton was missing.
International help, including 50 US Marines from a base in Japan and a team from Malaysia, had arrived on the scene, in southern Leyte province, by yesterday.
Communist rebels active in Leyte promised not to attack the Americans.
Efforts were concentrated on reaching the school, where 200 pupils and 40 teachers were thought to have been celebrating the anniversary of a health programme when the disaster happened.
The head of the rescue effort, Major-General Bonifacio Ramos, said that the soft mud made it impossible to get heavy equipment to the site.
"The mud is like quicksand.
"We can't move very fast and it's very difficult. We need special drilling equipment to detect if there is still signs of life underneath."
Helicopters were banned from flying over the area for fear of downdrafts moving the mud.
One Filipina nanny had returned from Britain to the village, her home.
Elsa Timbang wept as she scanned lists of survivors. She said: "My family, where is my family? I know they are there."
Injured
Her five-year-old niece was listed as dead.
The country's National Disaster Co-ordinating Council said that 65 bodies had been recovered and that 20 injured people had been rescued.
Fifty recovered bodies were buried yesterday in mass graves peppered with lime powder - a measure Health Secretary Francisco Duque said was necessary to prevent disease from spreading in the hot, fetid conditions.
"Some bodies are so bloated, they are in such a state of decomposition.
"But they are being buried in such a way that they can be exhumed later," Duque said.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is due to tour the scene of the disaster, about 675km southeast of Manila, today.
Although the president had pledged to give families piece of mind by recovering all of the bodies for burial, Mercado said a decision was likely within a few days about closing off the devastated area.
"We will put up a memorial symbol and we will say holy mass for the bereaved victims of the landslide," he said. (© The Times, London)
