From worst floods for 40 years:

Philippines remembers dead

PHILIPPINES: Government officials on Sunday urged the public to stay alert to the dangers of natural disasters as Manila remembered the 464 people killed in the worst floods to hit the capital in a generation.

Tropical Storm Ketsana unleashed a month’s worth of rain in six hours, pounding the capital of 12 million a year ago, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands.

At an open-air Roman Catholic mass on Sunday, Enrique Estanislao joined several hundred survivors on the bank of the Marikina River, which overflowed during the storm, destroying his family’s restaurant and killing some of his friends.

“It’s possible we would suffer more floods in my lifetime, though I hope not as bad as last year,” the 51 year-old told AFP as he heard mass along with neighbours. The floods, along with landslides that struck the country’s north a week later as Typhoon Parma swept in, left more than 1,000 people dead and affected 9.3 million people, or 10 percent of the Philippine population.

The World Bank put the combined recovery costs at about 4.4 billion dollars and urged the government to take steps to boost disaster response.

It warned that a repeat of the flooding, the worst since the late 1960s, could not be ruled out.

Estanislao told AFP it took his family a month just to clean up the debris from the restaurant and his house across the street.

Like many of his neighbours, he has added an upper floor to his property to escape future floods, after waters rose 20 feet (more than six metres) in some areas.

Experts in part blamed last year’s deluge on clogged drains and waterways but the government has largely failed to remove the thousands of squatters whose shanties obstruct the waterways.

At the start of the wet season in June the government said there were some 2.7 million squatters in Manila — half a million of them living in flood-prone areas such as beneath bridges, on top of open sewers, swamps and riverbanks.

Manila, Sunday, AFP