Updated on
Summary The death toll from the cyclone disaster that swept the southern Philippines has jumped above 900.
Authorities in the port cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, on the island of Mindanao, where sleeping families were swept to sea from coastal slums, said unclaimed corpses piling up in mortuaries were posing health risks and had to be interred.The head of the government disaster monitoring council said 927 people were now known to have been killed by tropical storm Washi, which brought heavy rains, flash floods and overflowing rivers to Mindanao.The death toll is expected to rise even further as more floating bodies are recovered after sunrise, said Benito Ramos, head of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.Ramoss latest toll was a sharp increase from the councils previous figures of 662 dead and 82 missing issued just hours earlier. The Philippine Red Cross, which is doing its own tally, reported 713 dead and 563 missing.They (the dead bodies) were washed out to sea. They were underwater for the first three days but now, in their state of decomposition, they are bloated and floating to the surface, Ramos told AFP.The death toll will rise again (in the morning) when more bodies surface.The huge death toll came as government relief workers recovered more bodies from Mindanao, particularly Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, which have borne most of the deaths from Washi.
