Supertyphoon Leaves 469 Dead

[CyberHustler]

At least 469 people have either been killed or are missing after Supertyphoon Durian smashed into the Philippines, causing flooding with the most rainfall in four decades, government officials said.

The typhoon, which hit the Philippines on Nov. 30, killed at least 208 people and injured 90 others, Glenn Rabonza, head of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said today. As many as 261 people are missing, he said.

Durian brought 249 kilometers an hour (155 miles an hour) winds and heavy rain that caused floods and mudslides in southeast Luzon, the nation's main island. It is the ninth tropical storm and typhoon to make landfall this year in the Philippines. The rainfall reached 466 millimeters, the country's largest since 1967, and exceeded the monthly amount in Albay, one of the provinces hardest hit, a government official said.

``The storm poured in one day an amount of rain that's greatly more than what that area gets in a month,'' Renato Solidum, director at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said today in a telephone interview. ``When you have such a big volume of rain, you'd see a lot of floods and landslides.''

Damage to infrastructure reached at least 1 billion pesos ($20 million), TV station GMA Network Inc. reported on its Web site yesterday, citing public works department Regional Director Oscar Cristobal.

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo has ordered the use of 1 billion pesos of government savings to rehabilitate the damaged areas, according to the Web site of the Office of the President.

Storm Damage

Rabonza said the storm damaged at least 23 million pesos of roads, bridges and schools, and destroyed 4.5 million pesos of crops and fish pens in the provinces of Aurora, Batangas, Marinduque and Occidental Mindoro. The government hasn't yet given damage estimates for other provinces.

The storm destroyed 27,816 houses and damaged 90,508 others in eight provinces, Rabonza said. The typhoon affected 799,056 people and led to the evacuation of 44,348 in 12 provinces.

Since 1991, floods and landslides triggered by typhoons have displaced about 1 million families and killed at least 10,000 people, according to the Web site of the Haribon Foundation, a Philippine environmental group.

At least 190 people were killed in areas around the Mayon volcano in Albay after the typhoon's rain softened debris accumulated from eruptions this year and triggered mudslides, Rabonza said.

Electricity

Albay and its neighboring provinces of Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte, and Sorsogon still have no electricity after the storm damaged transmission wires and the Kiwi geothermal power facility, Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said today.

Power in the areas, which just recovered from the damage from typhoon Xangsane in September, will probably be fully restored by Dec. 15, Lotilla said today in an interview with ANC News Channel. ``This is just based on preliminary estimates.''

Durian, the third supertyphoon to hit the Philippines this year, was 450 kilometers west-southwest of metropolitan Manila as of 10 a.m. today, according to the government weather bureau.

The storm is moving west at 15 kilometers per hour toward southern Vietnam and its winds have weakened to a maximum speed of 150 kilometers per hour, it said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...L7I&refer=home

[thebossxxx]

Very bad situation in The Phillipines, I give the people affected by this storm my warmest condolences and wish them luck...

[CyberHustler]

horrible.....