27 killed as typhoon lashes Philippines
Print Edition
TYPHOON Hagupit weakened to a tropical storm as it churned close to the Philippine capital Manila yesterday, after killing 27 people on the eastern island of Samar island where it flattened homes, toppled trees and cut power and communications.
Manila shut down as Hagupit, which means “lash” in Filipino, took aim at the tip of the main island Luzon, just south of the capital city of 12 million people.
“We now have a total of 27 dead, most of them in Borongan, Eastern Samar,” said Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, adding most of the dead drowned in floodwaters.
He said around 2,500 houses were totally or partially destroyed in Borongan, a town of 64,000 people.
But despite the rising death toll, there was relief that Hagupit had not brought destruction on the scale of super typhoon Haiyan, which last year killed thousands of people in the same areas of the central Philippines.
Hagupit roared in from the Pacific as a Category 3 typhoon on Saturday night, churning across Samar island and on to the smaller island of Masbate.
Its effects were felt across the central Philippines, including Leyte island and southern Luzon.
Learning lessons from Haiyan, which left more than 7,000 dead or missing, the authorities had launched a massive evacuation operation ahead of the storm, emptying whole towns and villages in coastal and landslide prone areas.
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