“FORCED EVACUATIONS”

Elsewhere in Cagayan, officials worked through heavy rain on Thursday to evacuate residents along the coasts and from the banks of already swollen rivers.

“Yesterday there were precautionary evacuations. Now we are doing forced evacuations,” local disaster official Edward Gaspar told AFP by phone hours before the landfall, adding that 1,404 residents were taking shelter at a municipal gym.

Cagayan Civil Defense chief Rueli Rapsing said he expected local governments to take 40,000 people to shelters, about the same number that were evacuated as a precaution ahead of Typhoon Yinxing, which hit the northern coast of Cagayan City earlier this month .

He said more than 5,000 Cagayan residents were still in shelters from earlier storms as the Cagayan River, the largest in the country, remained swollen due to heavy rains that fell in several provinces upstream.

Overlapping typhoons

After Usagi, severe tropical storm Man-yi will hit the densely populated capital Manila on Sunday.

This was similar to the path of last month’s severe tropical storm Trami, which accounted for most of the deaths in the recent spate of weather disasters to hit the country.

Local officials were ordered to persuade residents of flood- and landslide-prone communities in Man-yi’s path to move to shelters on Friday before landfall, the civil defense office said.

“Typhoons overlap. As soon as communities try to recover from the shock, the next tropical storm is already hitting them again,” said Gustavo Gonzalez, the UN humanitarian coordinator in the Philippines.

“In this context, response capacity is being depleted and budgets are being depleted.”

A UN assessment of weather disasters last month said 207,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and nearly 700,000 people were seeking temporary shelter.

Many families lacked even essentials such as sleeping mats, hygiene kits and cooking supplies, and had limited access to safe drinking water, it said.

The storms destroyed thousands of hectares of farmland, and persistent flooding could delay replanting efforts and worsen food supply problems, the report said.

About 20 major storms and typhoons hit the archipelago nation or surrounding waters each year, killing scores of people and driving millions into enduring poverty.

A recent study showed that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are forming closer to the coast, intensifying faster and lasting longer over land due to climate change.