Tropical Storm Floods Towns, 40 People Die in the Philippines

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ADDED Quotes from Marcos, death toll from police and disaster officials

Filipino rescue workers battled floodwaters on Friday to reach residents still trapped on the roofs of their homes as Tropical Storm Trami moved out to sea after killing at least 40 people.

Tens of thousands of people were displaced as they fled floods caused by heavy downpours that caused two months’ worth of rainfall in some areas to fall in just two days.

“Many people are still trapped on the roofs of their houses and asking for help,” Andre Dizon, police chief of the hard-hit Bicol region, told AFP. “We hope the flooding will decrease today as the rain has stopped.”

Accessibility remains a major challenge for rescue teams, especially in Bicol, President Ferdinand Marcos said at a news conference Friday.

“There were landslides in areas where there were no landslides before… so I guess the soil is completely saturated, the water has nowhere to go,” he said.

Marcos reported from the cities of Naga and Legazpi that “there were many dead, but we have not been able to get in yet.”

As Trami left the Philippines in the early hours and headed west across the South China Sea, the death toll from the storm rose as reports of new victims emerged.

Police sergeant Nelson Cabuso in Batangas province, south of the capital Manila, told AFP that six unidentified bodies were found in Sampaloc village.

“The region suffered a sudden flood yesterday. Our people are still checking whether there are any other casualties in the region,” he said.

Five more people died in flash flooding in the coastal village of Subic Ilaya, taking the death toll to at least 40, police corporal Alvin de Leon said, according to an AFP tally from police and disaster officials.

While Manila appeared to have escaped severe flooding that accompanied Typhoon Gaemi in July, AFP reporters spotted a largely submerged subdivision south of the capital on Friday.

Government offices and schools on Luzon’s main island remained closed Friday, and storm surge warnings were still in place along the west coast, with potential waves as high as two meters.

Batangas province saw “two months of rain” or 391.3 millimeters of precipitation on October 24 and 25, state weather agency expert Jofren Habaluyas told AFP.

An official count late Thursday said 193,000 people had been evacuated due to flooding that turned streets into rivers and half-buried some towns in mud-like volcanic sediments unleashed by the storm.

Most of them were in the Bicol region, where more than 30,000 people fled Wednesday due to “unexpectedly high” flooding.

Rescue teams in the district’s Naga city and Nabua municipality reached residents stranded on rooftops by boat, many of whom appealed for help via Facebook posts.

A hospital in the Batangas town of Lemery, about 97 kilometers (60 miles) south of Manila, was forced to turn away patients because its wards and emergency rooms were flooded.

The search for a missing fisherman whose boat sank off the coast of Bulacan province, west of Manila, was suspended Friday due to strong currents, the local disaster office said.

About 20 major storms and typhoons hit the Philippines or surrounding waters every year, damaging homes and infrastructure and killing dozens of people.

But a recent study showed that due to climate change, storms in the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly forming closer to coastlines, intensifying faster and lasting longer over land.

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