Mudslide in Philippines

The whole barangay [village] is no longer on the map. It was there this morning and now almost 100% of it has completely disappeared under the mud. When we arrived at the scene I said to myself, who are we going to rescue, because we didn't know where to start. The bulk of the village is invisible. If you go there you will not see any houses, it's all mud.

Then we met 11 survivors. They were all male and were like zombies. They didn't know what to do. Initially they couldn't even talk because they were in such a dazed and confused state. Eventually they told us what happened. They were coconut farmers who had left the village and were on the other side of the mountain doing their morning activities. They said it all started at some time between 10 and 11am.

They experienced an earthquake. Then they heard a rumbling sound, then it appeared as if the top of the mountain was coming down the slope on to the village. It all took somewhere between a minute and five minutes. They tried to hide from the wall of mud and when they came out they could do nothing.

It was all very traumatic for us. It's hard to know how to respond to what we saw in front of us. On the one hand my impulse says this is a job and we have to do what we've been trained to do. But as a human being we cannot detach ourselves from the disaster.

We helped with the retrieval of some of the community, perhaps about 30 people, but we could not stay the night. It is still raining and we're expecting another landslide. We believe the top of the mountain is very unstable but none of us rescuers knows this area because it has never experienced any landslides before. So we're now back at the municipal hall in St Bernard, planning what to do tomorrow."