Army, police and civilian volunteers scrambled on Monday to rescue hundreds of villagers trapped in their flooded homes and on rooftops in a northern Philippine province battered by slow-moving Typhoon Koppu.
The typhoon blew ashore into north-eastern Aurora province with fierce wind and heavy rains early Sunday, leaving at least two dead, forcing more than 16,000 villagers from their homes, and leaving nine provinces without electricity.
But after its landfall, the typhoon weakened, hemmed in by the Sierra Madre mountain range and a high pressure area in the country’s north and another typhoon far out in the Pacific in the east, government forecasters said.
Flash floods
By Monday morning, Koppu was located over Ilocos Norte province with winds of 120 kilometres (74 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 150 kph (93 mph). Several of the affected provinces, led by Nueva Ecija, were inundated by flash floods that swelled rivers and cascaded down mountainsides, trapping villagers in their homes and on rooftops, said Nigel Lontoc of the Office of Civil Defense.
“There were some people who needed to be rescued from the roofs of their homes,” Mr. Lontoc told The Associated Press by telephone on Monday. “But our rescuers couldn’t penetrate because the floodwaters were still high.”
His farmland turned into mud
Erwin Jacinto, a 37-year-old resident of Nueva Ecija’s Santa Rosa town, said the flooding turned his farmland into “nothing but mud.”
Mr. Jacinto spoke from the top of a high-level bridge that juts out from his flooded town and where dozens of farm villagers like him stayed in the open overnight with their families, and their pigs and chickens.
Authorities suspended dozens of flights and sea voyages, and many cities cancelled classes on Monday.
Teenager, woman killed
A teenager was pinned to death on Sunday by a fallen tree, which also injured four people and damaged three houses in metropolitan Manila. In Subic town, northwest of Manila, a concrete wall collapsed and killed a 62-year-old woman and injured her husband, officials said.
President Benigno Aquino III and disaster-response agencies had warned that Koppu’s rain and winds may potentially bring more damage with its slow speed. But government forecasters said that there was less heavy rain than expected initially in some areas, including in Manila, but that fierce winds lashed many regions.
12th such storm
Koppu, Japanese for “cup,” is the 12th storm to hit the Philippines this year. An average of 20 storms and typhoons each year batter the archipelago, one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.
In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most ferocious storms on record to hit land, barrelled through the central Philippines, levelling entire towns and leaving more than 7,300 people dead or missing.
