Four dead as tropical storm floods Philippines, disrupting schools and flights

MANILA: Tropical Storm Yagi dumped heavy rain in the Philippines for a second day on Monday (Sep 2), causing floods and landslides that have left at least four people dead, including a nine-month-old girl, officials said.
The eastern city of Naga was among the hardest hit as the storm sliced off its coast overnight Sunday, leaving two people dead including the baby girl who drowned as floodwaters rose, rescuers said.
“The floods were above head height in some areas,” Joshua Tuazon of the city’s public safety office told AFP, adding that hundreds of residents had been rescued.
More than 300 people remained at evacuation camps Monday, with local officials saying the floodwaters in the city of 210,000 people were slow to ebb due to high tide.
Two landslides killed two people and damaged five houses in the central city of Cebu on Sunday, the local disaster office told AFP.
Yagi tore northwards off the coast of the main island of Luzon on Monday morning with sustained winds of 75 kilometres an hour, the state weather service said.
It was due to make landfall in the northern province of Isabela later in the day, with four towns and about 33,000 people directly in its path.
Storm warnings were raised in a large swath of Luzon, the country’s most populous region, including in metropolitan Manila, where schools at all levels and most government work were suspended due to the stormy weather.
Sea travel was temporarily halted in several ports affected by the storm, stranding about 2,400 ferry passengers and cargo workers. More than two dozen domestic flights were suspended due to the stormy weather.
Tropical Storm Yagi was blowing over the coastal waters of Vinzons town in Camarines Norte province, southeast of Manila, on Monday with sustained winds of up to 75kmh and gusts of up to 90kmh, according to the weather bureau.
The storm, locally called Enteng, was moving northwestward at 10kmh near the eastern coast of the main northern region of Luzon, where the weather bureau warned of possible flash floods and landslides in mountainous provinces.
Along the crowded banks of the Marikina River in the eastern fringes of the capital, a siren was sounded in the morning to warn thousands of residents to brace for evacuation in case the river water continues to rise and overflow due to heavy rains.
In Northern Samar province, coast guard personnel used a rope to evacuate 40 villagers on Sunday in two villages that were engulfed in waist-high floods, the coast guard said.
Sea travel was temporarily halted in several ports affected by the storm, stranding about 2,400 ferry passengers and cargo workers, and nearly two dozen domestic flights were suspended due to the stormy weather.
About 20 typhoons and storms batter the Philippines each year. The archipelago lies in the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a region along most of the Pacific Ocean rim where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur, making the Southeast Asian nation one of the world’s most disaster-prone.
In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones in the world, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattened entire villages, swept ships inland and displaced more than 5 million people in the central Philippines.