New York Times News Service
MANILA, Philippines — Just after 1 a.m. Saturday, Mary Ann Melancio became concerned about a co-worker. He had sent her a text message saying he was trapped by floodwaters in his home with his wife and 10-year-old daughter.
“I called him, and he said in a very quiet voice, ‘The water is up to our stomachs, and we can’t get out. The current outside is strong,”’ recalled Melancio, a 36-year-old resident of the flood-stricken city of Iligan. “After that, the phone went dead.”
When the sun rose Sunday, Melancio and others went to the house, but her co-worker was gone. They fear he was swept away with his family.
“We walked back to our place and could see the bodies of dead people and animals along the road,” she said by telephone. “I have never seen a tragedy like this in my life.”
In neighborhoods throughout the cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, similar stories could be heard. In the dead of night Saturday, flash floods caused by Tropical Storm Washi sent water into the homes of sleeping families, and hundreds were drowned or dragged to their deaths by the currents.
The Philippine Red Cross said late Sunday that 652 people were known to have died in the flooding and estimated that more than 800 more were missing. An estimated 35,000 people were in evacuation centers, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. Red Cross workers and volunteers counted bodies in funeral parlors to tally the death toll, according to Gwendolyn T. Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine Red Cross, Gwendolyn T. Pang, while the number of missing was based on requests to trace missing family members.
“There are areas that rescuers have not been able to penetrate,” Pang said late Sunday in a telephone interview. “We expect the number of dead to increase, but this is still a search-and-rescue effort. We are finding people alive.”
Typhoons and tropical storms are common in the Philippines, which gets about 20 major storms a year, but they do not often slam into Mindanao the way this storm has, destroying thousands of houses and washing out roads and bridges. Benito Ramos, a civil defense official, said during a news briefing in Manila that the storm followed an unusual path, and local officials confirmed his assessment.
Though rescue workers continued to search for survivors Sunday, many of the workers — including thousands of soldiers — found themselves collecting the dead instead. Funeral homes in the two worst-hit cities reported that they were overwhelmed with bodies that had not yet been claimed.
In Cagayan de Oro, Nove Paulio said rescue workers had come to her neighborhood but that there was no one left to find.
“The houses in my place are empty or destroyed,” said Paulio, 19, who lived with her parents, sister and brothers in an area near a river that flooded. She said she was sleeping at about 1:30 a.m. Saturday when she felt water touch her foot, which was hanging off the bed. She ran to wake up her mother and siblings. Within minutes the water was up to her hips, she said; her mother clutched her infant sister, while she picked up her brothers, ages 2 and 3, and carried them out of the house.
The family made it to the roof of a nearby house and with the help of neighbors were able to swim, roof to roof, until they reached higher ground.
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