Families Mourn Storm Victims in Philippines

Inside the village hall, a middle-aged woman wept openly as she squatted before a row of four whitewashed coffins.

“These are my children. They’re gone,” Marina Regencia said Sunday between sobs, pointing to the coffins of her 10- and 8-year-old daughters, 4-year-old son and month-old boy. A fifth child was still missing.

The bodies were among 37 fished out of Calauag Bay on Friday and Saturday, after the 125-m.p.h. winds of Typhoon Angela lashed the northern Philippines, killing at least 500 people.

Two hundred others were reported missing after the country’s strongest storm in 11 years hit with 12-foot-high waves and flash floods. About 286,000 people remained in evacuation camps in Bicol, the region on the southeastern leg of Luzon, the Philippines’ main island, where Angela stormed ashore, said Fortunato de Joras, executive director of the National Disaster Coordinating Council.

The winds tore off the roofs of many concrete and wooden houses and thatched huts. In one village, a cluster of houses was flattened. Schools were destroyed, their galvanized iron roofs and walls peeled open, twisted and crumpled.

About 100 of the dead were from the fishing and coconut farming town of Calauag, a Quezon province town of 60,000 about 100 miles southeast of Manila.

Pilino Romero, 57, thought he could save his daughter and three grandchildren by making them climb on top of the roof as floodwaters started rising around midnight Thursday.

“My daughter and grandchildren are gone. And my house is gone,” Romero said, shaking his head as he recounted how a water reservoir several miles away had burst, sweeping away at least 80 houses. Romero and his wife survived by clinging to a coconut tree for hours.

Despite the devastation, Typhoon Angela’s death toll still fell far short of that in Typhoon Ike, which killed 4,353 when it hit the Philippines in 1984.