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Rescuers pull 50 alive from Filipino school: official

36 minutes ago

MANILA (Reuters) - Rescuers pulled 50 survivors from a school in the central Philippines on Monday, three days after their village was buried in a mudslide, an interior ministry official said on television.


U.S. marines recovered about 50 people from under the rubble at the school in Guinsaugon village, Marius Corpus, an undersecretary of the interior and local government department, told ABS-CBN.

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So Sad!

Hope of Philippine survivor miracle dashed

By Bobby Ranoco and Pedro Uchi 14 minutes ago

GUINSAUGON, Philippines (Reuters) - Hopes were raised and then dashed on Monday that 50 survivors had been pulled from a Philippine school three days after they had been buried in a landslide that has obliterated their village.

"We have yet to recover any survivor," Captain Burrell Parmer, a spokesman for U.S. Marines taking part in the desperate rescue operation, told the ABS-CBN television channel.

Parmer contradicted an earlier report from a Philippine government official who told ABS-CBN that U.S. forces had unearthed about 50 people from the rubble at a school in Guinsaugon, a remote farming community about 675 km (420 miles) southeast of Manila with a population of about 1,800.

Friday's devastating landslide, triggered by two weeks of heavy rain, obliterated the village.

But rescuers, including U.S. Marines dispatched from annual Philippine military exercises, focused efforts on the packed elementary school after unconfirmed reports that some of the 253 people trapped inside had sent desperate text messages on Friday.

So far, 84 bodies have been recovered from the village. Relatives have reported 1,371 villagers still missing.

Rescue workers, including teams from Taiwan and Malaysia, are battling deep, shifting mud and driving rain and have been told to tread softly for fear of drowning in the soupy earth.

In hospital, survivors told of jumping from roofs to escape the torrent of mud, which was set off by two weeks of heavy rain. One six-year-old girl survived by clinging to a coconut tree.

A three-year-old girl, among the first to be saved on Friday, died in hospital from injuries, television station ANC said.

Bloated and decomposing, 50 recovered bodies were buried on Sunday in mass graves sprinkled with holy water and lime powder -- a measure Health Secretary Francisco Duque said was necessary to prevent disease from spreading in the hot, fetid conditions.

President
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo viewed relief goods and dog teams being flown from a military airbase in Manila on Monday. She plans to visit the scene on Wednesday or Thursday.

Former first lady Imelda Marcos told the anti-graft court on Monday she had canceled her plan to go to Hong Kong to seek alternative medicine for her ailing knees and would instead go to Guinsaugon on Tuesday.

"The Leyte people are a priority over my health," the widow of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos said, adding that she intended to donate to the survivors the 630,000 pesos ($12,138) that she had deposited with the court as travel bond.

International agencies have also sent supplies, but many of the emergency goods must be trucked to the area on bad roads and around washed-out bridges.

On Monday, about 500 U.S. troops rushed to Guinsaugon. Brigadier-General Mastin Robeson said Washington planned to divert to Leyte up to 3,000 of the 5,000 U.S, soldiers and sailors taking part in annual war games in the southern Philippines.

Three warships and 17 helicopters were being diverted from the exercise to the disaster zone, Major Joseph Plenzler, a spokesman for the U.S. Marines said. Most of the soldiers rushing to Leyte had taken part in relief operations after the region was devastated by a tsunami in December 2004.

MORE LANDSLIDES

The Philippines is usually hit by about 20 typhoons each year, with residents and environmental groups often blaming illegal logging or mining for compounding the damage.

But in a country where most of the 86 million people are Roman Catholic, commentators, officials and even survivors also said the landslide was God's will.

Leyte island itself is no stranger to disaster. In 1991, more than 5,000 people died in floods triggered by a typhoon.

Around 2,000 people from villages near Guinsaugon were evacuated over the weekend as Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz warned of more potential catastrophes. Rains triggered by the La Nina weather pattern were expected to last until June.

A village in the southeastern province of Davao Oriental was evacuated on Monday after five people were killed in a landslide in the northwestern part of Mindanao island on Saturday.

(With reporting by Dolly Aglay and Carmel Crimmins in Manila)