US Marines Join Landslide Rescue Effort

US marines and Malaysian rescue experts yesterday joined hundreds of Philippine troops, officials and volunteers searching for survivors of the landslide that buried a village on Leyte Island, but the teams recovered only mud-caked corpses.

Officials were quoted by local media as saying that 410 of the 1,875 residents of Guinsaugon were not in the village when the wall of mud swallowed their homes, and that the number of missing is now 1,371. Fifty of the 72 bodies that have been recovered were unidentifiable, and were buried yesterday in a mass grave. Among the others was a Briton, named yesterday as Trevor White, 53, who lived in the village with his Filipina wife, Mary Cilmar.

The Philippine president, Gloria Arroyo, said yesterday: "All the efforts of our government will not stop while there is hope to find survivors." But hopes of finding anyone alive from Friday’s disaster have all but disappeared. "We’re not finding anything other than corpses," said an exhausted-sounding Red Cross official, Edwin Pamonag. "It will take a miracle now for someone to be brought out alive."

Much attention is focused on the primary school, after reports that some of the 200-plus students and seven staff sent text messages after the complex was covered in mud and sludge. "Our dogs found the location of the school today, but we quickly discovered the mud is 25 meters deep there," Mr. Pamonag said. "I am not confident that we will even be able to reach the school tomorrow."

The first American marine unit to arrive in Guinsaugon was a 30-strong assessment team from two US warships which were in the Philippines on exercises and were diverted to help the rescue. "It’s mind-boggling, it’s horrendous," said US navy commander Manuel Biadog, a Filipino-American chaplain assigned to marines. "It really feels sad to see this tragedy. It reminds me of 9/11."

Hundreds more of the 1,000 marines on the two ships are expected to join the search today.

Eleven nearby villages remain evacuated, as much of the central and southern Philippines remain on high landslide alert. Five people were killed on Saturday night when a landslide engulfed two houses in Zamboanga del Sur province, several hundred miles south of Guinsaugon.

Decades of illegal logging which ended in the mid-1990s are being cited as a large contributing factor to the disaster.

Van Hernandez, a campaigner director with the environmental group Greenpeace, said the government had received plenty of warnings that a landslide on such a scale was likely.

"The scale and frequency of similar tragedies in the past should have long before provoked the government into action to address the seemingly perennial problems of floods and landslides at the source," he said. A series of storms in late 2004 left about 1,800 people dead or presumed dead north-east of Manila. On Leyte Island in 1991, more than 5,000 died in floods triggered by a typhoon.