Landslide blamed on logging

GUINSAUGON, Philippines – Rescue workers held little hope today of finding more survivors from a devastating landslide that killed an estimated 1,800 people, saying this farming village in the eastern Philippines was swallowed whole by a wall of mud and boulders.

Survivors and others blamed persistent rains and illegal logging for Friday’s disaster.

The logging “stopped around 10 years ago,” Roger Mercado, a member of Congress who represents the area, told Manila radio station DZBB. “But this is the effect of the logging in the past.”

Soldiers were being shuttled to the disaster zone in the shovels of bulldozers that carried them across a shallow stream.

With the mud estimated to be 30 feet deep at some points, they were given sketches of the village so they could figure out approximately where the houses used to be.

Lt. Col. Raul Farnacio, the highest-ranking military officer at the scene, estimated the death toll at about 1,800 – nearly every man, woman and child who lived in Guinsaugon, about 400 miles east of the capital, Manila.

“Out of a population of 1,857, we have 57 survivors and 19 bodies,” a grim Farnacio said as search efforts resumed Saturday in a drenching rain and high winds that made the task even more miserable.

“We presume that more or less that 1,800 are feared dead,” he said.

Farnacio said the troops were digging only where they saw clear evidence of bodies because of the danger that the soft, unstable mud could shift and claim new victims.

The landslide left Guinsaugon looking like a giant patch of newly plowed land. Only a few jumbles of corrugated steel sheeting indicate the village ever existed.