Only one Negros death had been included in an earlier Government tally of 17 deaths outside Cebu.<\/p>\n
A shipping container blocks a road after it was swept away by the floods brought by Typhoon Kalmaegi in Mandaue City, Cebu province. Photo \/ Jam Sta Rosa, AFP<\/p>\n
That figure included six crew members of a military helicopter that crashed while on a typhoon relief mission.<\/p>\n
\u2018The water was raging\u2019<\/p>\n
AFP reporters spoke with residents of Cebu\u2019s most-affected areas on Wednesday (local time) as they cleaned up streets that had been rivers a day before.<\/p>\n
\u201cAround four or five in the morning, the water was so strong that you couldn\u2019t even step outside,\u201d said Reynaldo Vergara, 53, adding that everything in his small shop in Mandanaue had been lost when a nearby river overflowed.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing like this has ever happened. The water was raging.\u201d<\/p>\n
In nearby Talisay, where an informal settlement along a riverbank was washed away, AFP found 26-year-old Regie Mallorca already at work rebuilding his home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will take time because I don\u2019t have the money yet. It will take months,\u201d he said as he mixed cement and sand atop the rubble.<\/p>\n
This aerial photo shows damaged houses in the aftermath of Typhoon Kalmaegi in Talisay, in Cebu province. Photo \/ Jam Sta Rosa, AFP<\/p>\n
The area around Cebu City was deluged with 183mm of rain in the 24 hours before Kalmaegi\u2019s landfall, well over its 131mm monthly average, weather specialist Charmagne Varilla told AFP.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, provincial governor Pamela Baricuatro called the situation \u201cunprecedented\u201d and \u201cdevastating\u201d.<\/p>\n
Scientists warn that storms are becoming more powerful because of human-driven climate change. Warmer oceans allow typhoons to strengthen rapidly, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, meaning heavier rainfall.<\/p>\n
In total, nearly 800,000 people were moved from the typhoon\u2019s path.<\/p>\n
Seeing ghosts<\/p>\n
The catastrophic loss of life in Cebu comes as the public seethes over a scandal involving so-called ghost flood-control projects believed to have cost taxpayers billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Governor Baricuatro suggested a connection between the corruption scandal and what her spokesman later called \u201cunusual\u201d flooding in a cluster of subdivisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou begin to ask the question why we\u2019re having terrible flash floods here when you have Ph26.6 billion for flood control projects [in the national budget],\u201d she said in an interview with local outlet ABS-CBN.<\/p>\n
\u201cDefinitely we have seen projects here… that I would say are ghost projects,\u201d she said, adding her inspection team had not seen a single structure built to government standards.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson at the Department of Public Works and Highways, the government entity at the centre of the scandal, told AFP that department head Vince Dizon was already in Cebu to inspect typhoon damage.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter his inspection there, maybe he will comment,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
More storms coming<\/p>\n
The Philippines is hit by an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, routinely striking disaster-prone areas where millions live in poverty.<\/p>\n
The archipelagic country has already reached that average with Kalmaegi, weather specialist Varilla said, adding at least \u201cthree to five more\u201d storms could be expected by December\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
The Philippines was hit by two major storms in September, including Super Typhoon Ragasa, which tore the roofs off buildings on its way to killing 14 people in nearby Taiwan.<\/p>\n
By 5pm on Wednesday, Kalmaegi was moving westwards over the South China Sea and towards Vietnam, where authorities have warned it could compound the damage of a week of flooding that has already killed dozens of people.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only one Negros death had been included in an earlier Government tally of 17 deaths outside Cebu. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[3548,74,806,6743,89059,1853,57023,12626,634,38471,273,19876,71,23500,89058,6805,111,139,69,4517,4291,89060,8244,54885,147,42032,2726,34085,8598],"class_list":["post-128391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-3548","tag-after","tag-as","tag-became","tag-cebu","tag-central","tag-clearer","tag-climbed","tag-death","tag-devastating","tag-environment","tag-flooding","tag-from","tag-impact","tag-kalmaegi","tag-memory","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-past","tag-philippines","tag-province","tag-recent","tag-reels","tag-science","tag-toll","tag-tops","tag-typhoon","tag-worst"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}