Photo: Canadian Press

A villager monitors rescue operations after a landslide triggered by Tropical Storm Trami killed thousands of homeless people and many villagers in Talisay, Batangas province, Philippines, on Saturday, October 26, 2024.

As the storm battered his rural home under a hill with rain and wind, Raynaldo Dejucos asked his wife and five children to stay home and avoid being struck by lightning, slippery roads or caught on fire.

One thing the 36-year-old fish pen worker didn’t mention was the landslides. In the town by the lake Talisay 40,000 people living in the northeastern Philippines have never experienced these in their lives.

About four hours after he left home to check the fish cages at nearby Taal Lake in the early morning hours last Thursday, an avalanche of rainwater, mud, rocks and fallen trees rushed down the steep ridge behind his house, burying nearly a dozen homes. his.

Talisay, about 70 kilometers south of Manila, was one of several towns devastated by the attacks. Tropical Storm Trami – The deadliest of the 11 storms to hit the Philippines this year. The storm left at least 126 people dead and missing before veering towards Vietnam across the South China Sea. More than 5.7 million people in the northern and central provinces remained in the storm’s path.

“My wife was breastfeeding our 2-month-old baby,” Dejucos told The Associated Press on Saturday at the municipal basketball hall, where five white coffins of his entire family were placed side by side with the coffins of a dozen landslide victims. “When we found my children, they were hugging each other in bed.”

“I was saying the names of my wife and our children over and over again. Where are you? Where are you?”

Natural disasters and migration to dangerous areas are a deadly mix

It’s a new concern for Talisay and the latest reality check in the Philippines, long considered one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries at a time when climate change is at its extremes.

The Philippine archipelago, located between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, is considered the gateway to approximately 20 typhoons and storms that pass through 7,600 islands every year, some of which have destructive power. This country, with a population of over 110 million, is also located on the “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific. volcanic eruptions and most of the world’s earthquakes occur.

A deadly mix of increasingly destructive weather blamed on climate change and economic desperation, forcing people to live and work in previously off-limits disaster zones, has left many communities in Southeast Asia waiting for disasters to strike. Villages have sprouted on landslide-prone mountain slopes, active volcano slopes, earthquake fault lines, and along coastlines often inundated by tidal waves.

UN Under-Secretary-General Kamal Kishore, who heads the UN disaster mitigation agency, warned at a recent conference in the Philippines that disasters, including those caused by increasingly intense storms, threaten more people and could derail the region’s economic progress if governments fail to act . Don’t invest more in disaster prevention.

A volcano town bears the brunt of the disaster

Talisay and surrounding towns already have red flags.

The picturesque resort town is located north of Taal, one of the country’s 24 most active volcanoes, on a small island in the middle of the lake. Fruit and vegetable farms have developed in the fertile lands, which are also an important tourism center.

Over the decades, thousands of poor settlers like the Dejucos flocked to Talisay, and their villages expanded inland from the lake, onto a 20-mile-long ridge with an average elevation of 600 meters.

Village councilor Fernan Cosme, 59, told the AP that the high ridge surrounding Talisay’s northern edges has never posed a major risk, at least not in his lifetime. The main concern has always been the volcano, which has remained intermittently dormant since the 1500s.

“A lot of people are taking risks,” Cosme said of Talisay villagers who have become accustomed to Taal’s instability and survive in its shadow.

In 2020, Taal’s eruption displaced hundreds of thousands of people and sent ash clouds as far as Manila, shutting down its main international airport.

Carpenter Kervin de Torres wanted a safer community for his daughter Kisha, a high school student, but he and his wife separated and he bought a house near the Talisay ridge, where he lived with Kisha without her. Kisha was at home when she was buried by a landslide. The mother survived.

A distraught de Torres showed her daughter’s photo to police officers searching for the last two missing people on Saturday: Kisha and a baby from another family.

Three hours later, at a spot where Kisha was believed to be buried under a pile of soft mud, rocks and rubble, a digger scoop removed school uniforms hanging from plastic hangers.

Dozens of police and volunteers dug furiously with shovels until a foot was removed from the mud. De Torres watched anxiously and cried as the body of a young girl was removed and placed in a black body bag. When asked if he had a daughter, he nodded. While following the police officers who took their daughter’s body to the morgue for identification, teary-eyed citizens expressed their condolences.

Mother Doris Echin, 35, nearly died as she rushed out of her hut carrying her two daughters when an advancing mudslide submerged her waist-deep under water. He said he prayed a lot and barely managed to get through it.

As police and emergency personnel searched with three backhoes and a search dog, Echin stood next to his shack half-buried in mud in what looked like a wasteland, worried about the fate of his family.

“If we move, where will we find the money to build a new house? Which employer will give us jobs?” “If we rebuild and stay, we will be living between a volcano and a collapsing mountain.”