Death toll in Philippine washin floods move to 450

Dec.17-2011:Nksagar-Sagar Media Inc: Nearly 475 people have died,hundreds remain missing when tropical storm Washin (local name Sendong) brought heavy downpour that caused massive flooding in some parts of Mindanao on Saturday, military officials (live-PR.com) - Death toll in Philippines storms is 175-In Mindanao, 97 people died in the Misamis Oriental and Cagayan de Oro City areas. At least 125 others are missing and subject to search and rescue efforts, said Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Eastern Mindanao Command spokesman Leopold Galon.Citing reports from the field, Galon said about 2,000 others were rescued. Pounding rain from a tropical storm swelled rivers and sent walls of water crushing into two southern Philippine cities in the thick of night, killing at least 450 people, many caught in their beds. Philippine Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang told the news agency that the latest toll was based on a body count in funeral parlors. She said that 215 died in Cagayan de Oro and 144 in nearby Iligan cities, and the rest in several other southern and central provinces. Most of the dead were asleep Friday night when raging floodwaters tore through their homes from swollen rivers and cascaded from mountain slopes following 12 hours of pounding rain in the southern Mindanao region. Many of the bodies in parlors were unclaimed, indicating that entire families had perished, Pang said. The number of missing was unclear tonight. Before the latest Red Cross figures, military spokesman Lt. Col. Randolph Cabangbang said about 250 people were still unaccounted for in Iligan. Thousands of soldiers backed up by hundreds of local police, reservists, coast guard officers and civilian volunteers were mobilized for rescue and to clear a massive deluge that left the two coastal cities strewn with debris, trash, overturned vehicles and toppled trees. Some of the dead were swept out to sea from Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, which are intersected by rivers and flanked by mountains, in a region that is unaccustomed to the typhoons that are common elsewhere in the archipelago nation. Chief of the government's Civil Defense Office Benito Ramos attributed the high casualties in Mindanao "partly to the complacency of people because they are not in the usual path of storms" despite four days of warnings by officials of an approaching storm.(