Merchants Dig Out From Mud as Quake Toll Mounts : Philippines: Buildings in Dagupan City sink into brown muck spewing from street fissures. Nationally, the number of deaths climbs to 429.

Indian-born shopkeeper Ram Surtani put down his shovel briefly Thursday to explain just why his electronics store, Mera Emporium, was filled with mud and water nearly 3 feet deep.

“The building went down, and the road came up,” Surtani, 60, said. “All of a sudden, all the buildings sank 1 meter.”

Hundreds of merchants in this city of 120,000, the largest and most prosperous commercial center north of Manila, tried to dig themselves out of the brown seawater, mud and muck that spouted from fissures when the two main streets buckled and twisted in Monday’s massive earthquake.

Mayor Liderato Reyna said at least 80% of the government and commercial buildings, including 25 banks, must be abandoned. Three spans of a concrete bridge collapsed. And 14 people died, mostly in stampedes at local movie theaters.

Nationally, the death toll from the quake climbed to 429, with 190 missing, according to the civil defense office. The government-run television station reported more than 600 deaths, citing the national Red Cross and the Department of Public Welfare.

Those grim figures will grow, however, because rescuers conceded they had little hope of finding survivors in the concrete rubble of 22 major buildings that collapsed in Baguio, a northern mountain resort and university city that was hardest hit.

“No one is alive anymore,” John Mitchell, a member of the U.S. team of disaster experts sent to Baguio, told a television interviewer. “I think it is over. I think it may be too dangerous to pull out any more bodies.”

At least 300 people are believed buried under two flattened hotels, the Hyatt Terraces and the Nevada, and a large factory complex there. No one knows how many are entombed in six other hotels, several university buildings, churches and other tall structures that crumbled in the quake, or in three buses and other vehicles crushed in landslides nearby.

U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes carrying food and medical supplies finally reached the stricken city, cut off except by helicopter since Monday, after cracks in the airport runway were repaired. The planes helped evacuate several hundred stranded Filipino and foreign tourists who had jammed the airport.

But workers using dynamite and bulldozers again were unable to clear huge landslides that blocked the three mountain roads leading to the once-scenic city.

Up to 30,000 people, many carrying children and bundles of clothes, fled Baguio on foot, according to government officials in Manila, hiking over the landslides and further hampering road clearing operations.

Criticism also grew of the government’s disorganized approach and apparent inaction in the crucial first two days after the quake hit. President Corazon Aquino did not visit the affected areas until Wednesday, and no attempts have yet been made to house or clothe more than 250,000 people left homeless.

In Dagupan City, about 140 miles northwest of Manila, city engineers began assessing the extent of the damage along A.B. Fernandez Avenue and Perez Boulevard, the main business district. Hundreds of three- and four-story buildings are intact, but have sunk up to 3 feet in the mud and will be condemned.

The Far East Bank, for example, sank and tilted. Out front, a parked truck fell into a fissure, leaving its back wheels in the air. Telephone poles lean over crazily. The road is buckled and broken.

Bank cashier Carol Palaroan, 28, said she had just finished counting the day’s receipts of about $260,000 when the quake hit. “When we ran out, all the cash was scattered,” she said. “We ran to the bridge, but it collapsed. So we just ran for our lives.”

The money was still there when she returned the next day, she added with a smile.