More dead feared in Manila garbage slide
More dead feared in Manila garbage slide
MANILA (Reuters): Philippine officials said on Tuesday 91
bodies had been recovered and about 100 others were missing
feared dead in the collapse of a mountain of garbage on a Manila
shantytown.
"It's a recovery operation, not a search and rescue
operation," Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado told Reuters some
36 hours after an avalanche of rain-drenched garbage thundered
down on the squatters colony.
He said local officials at the Promised Land shantytown had no
firm count on how many were still buried under a hectare-wide
pile of rubbish but he believed there were about 100.
The Red Cross estimated 70 were missing but the local civil
defense office put the number at several hundred.
Rescue officer Lt. Fausto Tapiador gave a much higher
estimate, saying he believed the bodies so far retrieved were
"only about five percent" of the total missing. "Yes," Mercado
said when asked if he believed if all those buried were dead.
Rescue teams were digging at 17 sites but in some areas had
not been able to penetrate beyond the roofs of the collapsed
shanties, a Red Cross spokeswoman said.
Among the latest victims found were Maria Balbuena and her
five-year-old son, Allan, whose bodies were lifted by a
mechanical digger from a smoldering heap of garbage that was once
their home.
A fire broke out in the dump after Monday's collapse as a live
electric cable snapped and ignited trash and trapped methane gas.
Maria was clutching her son to her breast with both arms as
though trying to shield him from harm.
"I had been looking for them," wept Balbuena's husband as he
identified the bodies of his wife and son. "Last night I prayed I
will find them, but now they are gone."
Relief officer Adela Pamat told Reuters: "Up to yesterday
afternoon, we could still hear voices from below calling for
help, but last night we could no longer hear them. "Even the
relatives say they think all of them are dead. I think they are
all dead, too."
An army captain said: "All we could find are dead people."
About 100 people were also injured when a one-hectare section of
the 10-hectare garbage dump in the Manila suburb of Quezon City
crumbled after being pounded for days by typhoon Kai-Tak.
More than 100 squatter huts at the base of the massive dump,
which towers over the shantytown like a volcano, were crushed in
the avalanche of rubbish and mud.
Mercado said it might take four days to recover the bodies of
the missing but rescue teams needed smaller dredging equipment to
prevent the rubble from giving way and burying victims even
deeper.
By Tuesday, the smell of rubbish was giving way to the stench
of rotting bodies coming from the heap.
Grief-stricken relatives braved the smell and clustered around
crushed shanties, desperately hoping someone might still be found
alive.
The dumpsite -- ironically called Lupang Pangako (Promised
Land) -- is a bleak underworld of 80,000 slum-dwellers, most of
whom trek up the small mountain of garbage daily to forage for
used plastic containers, picture frames, broken toys and broken
appliances to sell to junk shops.
For 20 years, it has stood as a symbol of the massive poverty
gripping this Roman Catholic nation of 75 million. Each scavenger
earns about 200 pesos (US$4.50) a day.
President Joseph Estrada said the government planned to close
the dump. "We are working on a housing project for these people
(the squatters) so that they would have a decent place to live
in," he said in a radio interview.
As soldiers rummaged through the rubble, one elderly woman who
had lost her daughter in the disaster and was looking for other
missing relatives, broke down and wept.
"They have found my daughter's body and it was badly burned.
They also found the body of her daughter but its head was gone,"
Conchita Ramos wailed.
"We are not blaming anyone for this but we want to have their
bodies back. We are calling on President Erap (Estrada): 'Please,
have the bodies dug up. Many of them are still buried there.
There are still thousands of them buried there.'"