3 dead, 10 homes buried in Philippine monsoon landslide

Naga (Philippines): At least three people were killed and 10 homes buried early Thursday in the central Philippines when heavy monsoon rains unleashed a landslide in a rural farming community, authorities said.

The new tragedy comes as the Philippines is recovering from 2018’s most powerful storm, Typhoon Mangkhut, which caused a separate landslide in the nation’s north where dozens are buried and believed dead.

The new slide happened around 6:00 am (2200 Wednesday GMT) in the rural town of Tina-an, which is on the popular tourist island of Cebu. Days of heavy monsoon rains caused a steep slope to collapse and now searchers are frantically looking for survivors.

“We have recovered three bodies. The others sustained minor injuries and we have taken them to hospital,” civil defence spokesman Julius Regner told reporters.

“The rescue effort continues. There (were) about 10-15 houses or households in the area.” At the same time, hundreds of rescuers continued a grim effort searching for bodies in the mining area of Itogon in the mountainous north of the Philippines, which was the area worst hit by the typhoon.

Mangkhut swamped farm fields in the nation’s agricultural north and smashed houses when it tore through at the weekend with violent winds and heavy rains.

The Philippines’s deadliest storm on record is Super Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,350 people dead or missing across the central Philippines in November 2013 A landslide there on Saturday smashed into dwellings used by small-scale miners, burying dozens of people. Most of the 81 people killed in the storm died in that slide and others in the same area.

The area was primed for disaster before Mangkhut hit, as it came on the heels of nearly a month of continuous monsoon rains that saturated the soil of the already hazardous area.