More than 130 dead in Philippine mudslides, flooding

Manila : A crocodile killed and ate a man who was securing his boat as a tropical storm bore down on the Philippines, police said yesterday.

Abdulsalam Binang Amerhasan, 53, went to a river in driving rain on Thursday to tie up his boat on the western island of Palawan, with waters rising as Tropical Storm Tembin closed in, a police report said.

The death toll from a tropical storm climbed swiftly to 133 yesterday, as rescuers pulled dozens of bodies from a swollen river.

When Amerhasan failed to return home after an hour, his worried wife sought help from neighbours who launched an overnight search, believing he had had an accident, it added.

According to the police report, the community searched along the river ‘until they found out that the lifeless body of the victim was still (being) tumultuously bitten by a crocodile’.

The state weather service said Tembin was expected to hit Balabac and Bataraza late Saturday after killing more than 100 people on the main southern island of Mindanao.

Tropical Storm Tembin has lashed the nation’s second-largest island of Mindanao since Friday, triggering flash floods and mudslides.

The Philippines is pummelled by 20 major storms each year on average, many of them deadly but Mindanao, home to 20 million people, is rarely hit.

Police, soldiers and volunteers used shovels to dig through mud and debris as they searched for bodies in the village of Dalama on Saturday.

‘The river rose and most of the homes were swept away. The village is no longer there,’ police officer Gerry Parami said, speaking from nearby Tubod town. Rescuers meanwhile retrieved 36 bodies from the Salog River in nearby Sapad town on Saturday.

The bodies in Sapad were swept downriver from a flooded town upstream called Salvador, Rando Salvacion, the Sapad town police chief said. Authorities in Salvador said they had retrieved 17 other bodies upstream.

Tubod, Salvador and Sapad are in Lanao del Norte, which is one of the provinces hardest hit by Tembin. ‘The people received ample warnings. But as we are rarely hit by typhoons, people living near rivers did not take them seriously,’ said Salvador police chief Wilson Mislores.

The state weather service said Tembin is expected to hit Balabac, a fishing island of 40,000 people in the western Philippines late Saturday with gusts of 115 kilometres (71 miles) an hour.