Philippines flood death toll hits 650

landslides swept houses into rivers and out to sea, killing more than 650 people.
The cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan on the island of Mindanao were worst hit when typhoon Washi hit shore late on Friday and early on Saturday, sending torrents of water and mud through villages and stripping mountainsides bare.
The Philippine National Red Cross said 652 people were killed in eight provinces in the southern Mindanao region, which is unused to typhoons. Our office was swamped with hundreds of requests to help find their missing parents, children and relatives,” Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the PNRC, told reporters. “We’re helping co-ordinate the search with local government, army, police and even other aid agencies.”
Floods washed away houses with families inside in dozens of coastal villages around Cagayan de Oro and Iligan.
The state disaster agency said adequate warnings had been given to officials and residents three days before the typhoon made landfall.
Disaster and health officials were struggling to deal with the scores of bodies that have been recovered. Some were stacked on top of each other in under-staffed mortuaries unable to cope with the number of dead.
“I saw for myself bloated bodies of women and children, not less than 100,” the vice president, Jejomar Binay, told Philippines radio as he toured Cagayan de Oro. Binay distributed food packs and ordered the relocation of families living near waterways and other hazards. Brigadier General Roland Amarille, head of an army task force in Iligan, said soldiers had been mobilised to recover bodies and build coffins.
“We need bodybags and lime to deal with too many bodies,” Amarille said, fearing an outbreak of disease.
“Local mortuaries are no longer accepting bodies and they are even asking people to bury the dead at once because there are too many bodies even in hallways,” he said.
Most of the dead were from a slum area on an island sandwiched by two rivers in Iligan. “About 70% of the houses on the island were washed into the sea,” Amarille said.
Mindanao, the southernmost major island in the Philippines, is a mineral-rich region that also produces rice and corn but is not normally in the path of the average 20 typhoons that hit the south-east Asian country each year.
“This poses challenges to us . . . We need to educate people with this kind of change in climate,” Pang said. Reuters/guardian.co.uk.