Philippine flood deaths climb to 60

Thousands more Philippine flood victims crammed into evacuation centres on Friday as waist-high water covered vast farming regions and the death toll from a week of misery rose to 60.

The flooding that submerged 80 percent of Manila early in the week has largely subsided, allowing people to return to their homes, but vital rice-growing areas to the north remained under water as more rain fell there.

"We need something to eat. I haven't gone to work or been paid for a week," said Rogelio Soco, a construction worker and father-of-three in the small farming town of Apalit, about 60km from Manila.

Soco, 60, said the floods, which began on Monday, were the worst the area had seen since a huge typhoon struck in the early 1970s, and other locals also said they had not experienced anything like it for decades.

Around Apalit, formerly green rice paddies had been turned into an enormous inland ocean of brown water.

Rice farmer Pablo Torres, 58, said his two-hectare (five-acre) field planted last month had likely been destroyed, and dozens of people in his community had suffered the same fate.

"We will have to do it all over again... we have lost a lot of money here," he said.

Nearly two weeks of monsoon rains across the Philippines' main island of Luzon peaked with a 48-hour deluge earlier this week that battered Manila and surrounding regions.

The government's disaster co-ordination council said Friday that 60 people had been confirmed killed in this week's floods, triple the number on Thursday.

The extra deaths occurred mainly in the provinces during the initial deluges from Monday to Wednesday, but government officials in the outlying areas could not immediately report the casualties to Manila headquarters, the council said.

The number of people now confirmed killed across the country since the rains first began in late July is 113, according to the council's data.

Meanwhile the government said it was struggling to cope with the scale of a relief effort across Luzon that was expected to last for weeks.

Tens of thousands of people were continuing to stream into evacuation centres that were already overcrowded and unable to provide enough immediate relief goods.

"The water is still high and the local government units are getting overwhelmed," Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman told AFP, referring to the farming provinces north of Manila she was touring on Friday.

Just over 362,000 people were sheltering in evacuation centres, nearly 50,000 more than on Thursday, according to the disaster council.
International charity group Save the Children warned that a lack of toilets and clean water in evacuation centres could lead to outbreaks of disease.

"We have seen multiple cases of diarrhoea, flu and skin rash in evacuation centres, all of which can spread very quickly if people do not have good hygiene practices," said Anna Lindenfors, the group's country director.

The number of people officially affected by the floods also rose to 2.44 million, from 2.1 million on Thursday.

In Manila, clean-up operations were underway in riverside communities that endured waters up to two metres (six and a half feet) high on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Francesca Deimoy, 54, a resident of Marikina, one of the worst-hit districts, said the community was worried about further flooding with the monsoon season only just beginning.

"I sometimes feel like I could cry because you don't know what to do. You think the worst is over and then the flood comes back," she said.

The Southeast Asian archipelago endures about 20 major storms or typhoons each rainy season, many of which are deadly.

But this week's rains were the worst to hit Manila since Tropical Storm Ketsana killed 464 people in 2009.

Environment Secretary Ramon Paje warned that the Philippines must prepare for more intense rains caused by climate change, describing the latest deluge as the "new normal".
 

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.