(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.(
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Save Dissent to Save Democracy THE rising instances of physical violence and threats against political opponents and the inability to accept dissent must raise huge concerns amongst all of us who see democracy as perhaps the really stellar achievement since Independence. AAP’s attack on BJP headquarters and acts of arson committed under the very noses of their elite leadership; the attacks on Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia in Gujarat in the last two days; the recent manhandling of the caretaker of journalist Siddharth Varadarajan’s house by some garden variety thugs; and the violence and threats meted out regularly to their political opponents by political parties is surely deplorable and condemnable. This is a fatally flawed trend which will destroy the very foundations of our democratic institutions if not pushed back with all the strength and condemnation that the civil society can mobilise. Replaying the past To begin with, it must be clarified that we should ...
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