Marcelino Aringo reflects on a gate near his damaged house after a landslide triggered by Tropical Storm Trami hit homes and killed many villagers in Talisay, Philippines, on Saturday. Aaron Favila/Associated Press

TALISAY, Philippines — The death toll from massive floods and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Trami in the Philippines has reached nearly 130, and many areas remain isolated with people needing rescue, the president said Saturday.

The government’s disaster response agency said Trami blew past the northwestern Philippines on Friday, leaving at least 85 people dead and 41 missing in one of the Southeast Asian archipelago’s deadliest and most destructive storms this year. The death toll was expected to rise due to reports from previously isolated areas.

Dozens of police, firefighters and other emergency personnel, assisted by three diggers and search dogs, rescued one of the last two missing villagers in the lakeside town of Talisay in Batangas province on Saturday.

A father waiting for news about his missing 14-year-old daughter cried as rescue teams placed the body in a black body bag. Distraught, he followed police officers carrying the body bag down a mud-covered village street to a police van as a weeping resident approached him to express his condolences.

The man said he was sure it was his daughter, but authorities needed to carry out checks to verify the identity of the villager who dug into the mound.

At a nearby ballpark downtown, more than a dozen white coffins lay side by side, carrying the remains of those found in piles of mud, rocks and trees that flowed down the steep slope of a forested hill Thursday afternoon. Sampaloc village of Talisay.

President Ferdinand Marcos, who inspected another hard-hit region southeast of Manila on Saturday, said unusually large rainfall dumped by the storm – including some areas that saw one to two months’ worth of rainfall in just 24 hours – suppressed the flooding. Controls in the provinces attacked by Trami.

“There was too much water,” Marcos told reporters.

“We haven’t finished our rescue efforts yet,” he added. “Our problem here is that there are still a lot of areas that are flooded and cannot even be accessed by big trucks.”

Marcos said his administration will plan to begin work on a major flood control project that could meet the unprecedented threats posed by climate change.

The government agency said more than 5 million people were in the storm’s path, including nearly half a million people, most of whom fled to more than 6,300 emergency shelters in various provinces.

At an emergency Cabinet meeting, Marcos expressed concern over reports by government forecasters that the storm, the 11th to hit the Philippines this year, could make a U-turn next week as it is pushed back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea. .

It is estimated that the storm will hit Vietnam over the weekend if it does not deviate from its route.

The Philippine government closed schools and government offices for a third day on Friday to keep millions of people safe on the northern island of Luzon. Inter-island ferry services were also stopped and thousands of people were stranded.

The weather cleared in many regions on Saturday, allowing cleaning efforts in most regions.

Approximately 20 storms and typhoons occur every year in the Philippines, a Southeast Asian archipelago located between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing and destroyed entire villages.

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