Typhoon Nalgae lashed the Philippines on Saturday, killing one person and bringing fresh misery for more than a million people trapped by earlier storm floods, officials said.
The weather service said Nalgae swept out into the South China Sea after a six-hour daytime rampage on the main island of Luzon, but disaster management chief Benito Ramos said millions of people remained in danger.
“The fight is not over yet,” he told AFP, explaining that the rain-soaked Cordillera mountains on the typhoon’s direct path, which have a total population of about three million, now faced the threat of landslides.
Meanwhile, he said up to eight million people in the central Luzon plains, located between Cordillera and Manila, faced much worse floods than the earlier destruction caused by typhoon Nesat, which had followed the same path. “I hope the (Nesat) floods will wash out to Manila Bay before the (Nalgae) runoff hits the area,” Ramos said, a scenario that he said could play out before dawn on Sunday.
“If the latter catches up to the former, there won’t be any rooftops left to see above the floodwaters,” he said, while repeating an earlier appeal for people to leave all inundated areas now. His agency listed 180,000 evacuees overall, mostly victims displaced by Nesat.
Meanwhile, the death toll from Nesat had risen to 52, with 31 fishermen still missing, Ramos said.