The death toll from a storm that unleashed landslides and floods across the southern Philippines has climbed to 240 with scores of others still missing, officials said Monday.
Tropical Storm Tembin on Friday struck the country's main southern island of Mindanao, which often escapes the 20 or so storms that batter the rest of the archipelago nation each year.
Civil defence officials said the number of confirmed deaths from Tembin on Mindanao's Zamboanga peninsula had risen to 78, while the death toll in Lanao del Sur province on the island went up to 27.
The storm killed 135 others in the northern section of the island, police said Monday, a figure that was unchanged from a day earlier.
Rescuers are still looking for 107 people in these three areas. Many were feared killed by mudslides and flash floods that buried or swept away hundreds of houses last weekend.
Civil defence officials said some 13,000 Mindanao families — at least 52,000 people — remained in evacuation camps on Christmas Day, many with few if any possessions left.
Tembin swept out into the South China Sea early Sunday, with weather forecasters warning it would hit southern Vietnam later Monday.
Two other typhoons are known to have inflicted more deaths on Mindanao than Tembin, according to government records.
Typhoon Bopha left 1,900 people dead or missing mainly on Mindanao's eastern provinces in December 2012, while Typhoon Washi killed 1,080 people on Mindanao's north coast in December 2011.
The deadliest typhoon to hit the country is still Haiyan, which left more than 7,350 people dead or missing and destroyed entire towns in the central Philippines in November 2013.
– Village erased –
One of the places hit hardest by the storm was the mountain village of Dalama, which was virtually erased from the map.
Footage filmed by Filipino television network ABS-CBN showed houses destroyed or engulfed by floodwaters there and rescuers retrieving the body of a dead girl buried in a landslide.
Police, soldiers and volunteers used shovels and their bare hands to dig through mud and debris in their search for survivors.
"The flood was already close and the people were not able to get out from their homes," Armando Sangcopan, an elderly male survivor, told the station.
Rescuers said a total of 103 houses were carried off by rampaging floodwaters in Dalama.
The storm approached the western island of Palawan, a popular tourist draw, late Saturday and swept into the South China Sea before dawn, the state weather service said.
"So far zero casualties, but we have accounts of some people missing," Palawan civil defence chief Zaldy Ablana told DZMM radio in an interview on Sunday.
But in a Palawan fishing village, a 53-year-old man was killed by a crocodile while securing his boat in a river.
Tembin struck less than a week after Tropical Storm Kai-Tak left scores dead and more than 20 missing in the central Philippines, straining the disaster-prone nation's already stretched resources.
Thousands stranded after storm lashes Philippines
Thousands of people heading home for Christmas in the Philippines were stranded on Sunday by Tropical Depression Kai-Tak, a day after the storm killed three people as it pounded the nation's eastern islands.
The storm has weakened, with gusts of up to 90 kilometres (56 miles) an hour, after cutting off power and triggering landslides in a region devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan four years … read more
