At least 13 people have died in floods, landslides and rain-related accidents in the northern Philippines after nine days of torrential rainfall, rescuers said on Monday.
The downpour, fuelled by tropical storms, has caused widespread flooding across Luzon, the country’s main island, forcing schools and government offices to close. Streets in the capital, Manila, were also inundated.
Four of the deaths occurred in the mountain resort city of Baguio, where a rain-soaked mountainside collapsed onto several houses, killing four residents, according to city disaster official Charles Carame.
Rescuers were digging through the rubble on Monday in search of at least six people who remained missing a day after the landslide.
State weather forecaster Dan Villamil said Baguio had already received rainfall 47 per cent higher than its normal total for the entire month of August.
“The rainfall recorded for August 1-9 was highest in Baguio, with an accumulated 1,413.2 millimetres (56 inches),” he said, noting that the city’s typical rainfall for August is 963.2 millimetres.
Parts of Metro Manila had also recorded rainfall equivalent to about 90 per cent of the area’s typical August total.
Landslides killed six other people elsewhere on Luzon, while one person drowned, another was struck by a falling tree and another was electrocuted, according to a civil defence office tally.
Although heavy rain continued into Monday evening, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon said floodwaters were beginning to recede.
“Our interventions are continuing, but we really need to fix the years and decades’ worth of faulty flood mitigation interventions,” Dizon told reporters, referring to a scandal involving alleged bogus flood-control projects that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
The Philippines lies along the Pacific cyclone belt and is struck by an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, leaving millions of people living in disaster-prone areas vulnerable to extreme weather.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent, prolonged and intense.
