Four people, including three children, were killed in landslides triggered by heavy rains brought by a tropical storm in the southern Philippines, police and local officials said yesterday.
The victims included a 23-year-old mother and her two children, aged two and six years, whose house was buried in a landslide in the town of Carrascal in Surigao del Sur province, 786km south of Manila.
A 10-year-old was also killed in a separate landslide in the same town, according to local disaster relief officials. More than 1,800 residents were forced to flee their homes in Surigao del Sur and the nearby province of Surigao del Norte due to tropical storm Sanba, which made landfall Tuesday morning, the national disaster relief agency said. Sanba weakened into a tropical depression after it made landfall in the town of Cantilan in Surigao del Sur, the weather bureau said.
The tropical depression was packing maximum winds of 55km per hour (kph) and gusts of up to 75kph as it moved west-northwest at 25kph, it added.
It was expected to be out of the country by Friday morning. An average of 20 typhoons batter the Philippines every year. In November 2013, Super Typhoon Haiyan killed more than 6,000 people and left more than 1,000 missing in the eastern Philippines. Haiyan, the worst to hit the archipelago in decades, was one of the most powerful storms in the world to make landfall.
Residents use a canoe to survey their village.
