Rescuers in the Philippines were diving into a lake and searching isolated villages on Sunday to locate dozens of missing people, as the death toll from Tropical Storm Trami reached 100.
Trami, which struck the Philippines on October 24, was one of the deadliest typhoons to hit the Southeast Asian country this year.
According to the National Disaster Agency, it forced more than half a million people to flee their homes and at least 36 people are missing.
Police in the worst-hit Bicol region recorded 38 deaths, most of them due to drowning.
“We are still receiving many calls and we are trying to rescue as many people as possible,” Bicol regional police director Andre Dizon told AFP.
“Hopefully, there will be no more deaths.”
Dizon said “many residents” in the region’s Camarines Sur province were still trapped on rooftops and upper floors of their homes.
The death toll in Batangas, south of Manila, has risen to 55, provincial police chief Jacinto Malinao told AFP.
Two people were reported dead in separate incidents of electric shock and drowning in Cavite province, police said.
Five more bodies were recovered in other provinces, bringing the total to 100, according to AFP calculations based on official police and disaster agency sources.
“The death toll could rise in the coming days as rescue teams can now reach previously isolated locations,” Edgar Posadas, of the civil protection office, told AFP.
Police, the Coast Guard and a Marine diving team were searching for a family of seven at Taal Lake in Batangas on Sunday.
“Water from the mountains hit their house in the town of Balete, possibly washing it away with them,” provincial police chief Malinao said.
Most of the deaths in Batangas were attributed to landslides caused by the rains.
More than 20 bodies were pulled from piles of mud, stones and fallen trees, while police said at least 20 other people were still missing in the province.
“We will continue the search until all the bodies are recovered,” Malinao said.
About 560,000 people have been displaced by the floods, which have submerged hundreds of villages in the northern Philippines, the national disaster agency said Sunday.
Each year about 20 major storms and hurricanes hit the archipelago nation or its surrounding waters, damaging homes and infrastructure and killing dozens of people.
A recent study showed that climate change is causing hurricanes in the Asia-Pacific region to increasingly form closer to the coast, intensify more rapidly and last longer over land.
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