Death toll tops 1,000 in Philippines after flash floods

Relief operations pushed on in the southern Philippines on Thursday after flash floods and landslides triggered by tropical storm Washi killed more than a thousand people and left tens of thousands more homeless.

Hundreds of villagers from the heavily hit cities of Cagayan De Oro and Iligan travelled through muddy roads and waited in a long queue to receive rations from social workers.
         
Power was still out in the cities and water supply remained a problem as families return to their mud-stricken villages and begin reconstructing their homes from the debris.

Typhoon Washi, with winds gusting up to 90 kilometres per hour, hit the resource-rich island of Mindanao late Friday.
         
Twenty-one-year-old Wilson Termacio, who had recently graduated from college, was airing his soaked school documents and trying to salvage what remained of his belongings from the rubble.

Termacio was about to travel to the city and find work to help with his family’s expenses when the floods struck.

He said he was worried his family would not be able to recover from the damage.
         
“I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how we can recover. Our home is gone,” he said.
         
The national disaster agency reported over 1,002 casualties, while an indefinite number, presumed to be in the hundreds, remain missing.
         
The report said more than 641,000 people were left homeless, while nearly one billion pesos ($23 million) worth of infrastructure, schools and hospitals were destroyed in floods.
         
The Agriculture department said more than 15 million pesos ($343,000) worth of crops, mostly rice and corn, were damaged.
         
Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo said President Benigno Aquino allotted at least 50 million pesos ($1.14 million) for the building of new houses in the two devastated cities.
         
In Manila, activists rallied near the presidential palace, demanding the Aquino government’s accountability for the casualties and damage from the storm.
         
Carrying placards and wooden crosses, protesters urged Aquino to cancel all of its logging and mining contracts in the country, which they believed was the cause of widespread floods.
         
“It’s not just stopping the illegal loggers, but there’s also a need to suspend the large scale mining operations and to stop clearing forests for plantations,” said Anton Dulce, vice chairperson of the left-leaning activist group Child of the Masses.
         
Aquino had declared a logging suspension for the whole country after his meeting with government officials in Cagayan de Oro and Iligan cities on Tuesday while waiting for the results of the investigation as to the cause of the deadly flash floods.