MANILA: Rescuers in the Philippines raced Saturday to reach people still stranded in areas made inaccessible by flooding from Tropical Storm Trami, which has killed at least 97 people.

Trami battered the main island of Luzon and forced nearly half a million people to flee their homes as heavy rain caused widespread floods and landslides. In the hardest-hit Bicol region, residents trapped on the roofs and upper floors of their homes were still awaiting desperately needed assistance, officials said. “The floods have yet to subside. Calls asking for help are still pouring here,” Bicol regional police director Andre Dizon told AFP.

“We need to rescue them as soon as possible because starvation can be a problem. We’re hearing reports that children are already getting sick.” In the region’s Camarines Sur province, food and drinking water were in increasingly short supply as some areas remained completely submerged and difficult to access, he added. President Ferdinand Marcos visited the province on Saturday to inspect the damage.

“Our main problem here is that many areas are still flooded,” he told government officials during a briefing. “We have flood control systems but the amount of water is unmanageable. This is climate change. This is all new, so we have to come up with new solutions too,” Marcos added. Trami’s death toll rose Saturday as rescuers retrieved more bodies from floodwaters and landslide sites, mostly from the Bicol region and Batangas province, south of Manila.

Police have recorded 36 deaths in Bicol, most due to drowning. The number of confirmed dead in Batangas has risen to 54, provincial police chief Jacinto Malinao told AFP, with at least 21 people missing. Two were reported dead in separate incidents of electrocution and drowning in Cavite province, police told AFP on Saturday. Five more deaths have been confirmed in other provinces, bringing the total to 97, according to an AFP tally based on official police and disaster agency sources.

In Batangas, two hours south of the capital, rescuers were using backhoes and shovels to dig through mud as high as three meters (10 feet) in a desperate search for the missing in areas hit by landslides.

Cadaver-sniffing dogs have also been deployed to assist the operations. AFP reporters who visited the province on Friday saw roads blocked by felled trees, vehicles half-submerged in mud and homes severely damaged by flash flooding. “We are still hoping for the best,” said Malinao, the police chief.

“We will not stop until all bodies are retrieved.” The national disaster agency said Saturday that about 495,000 people have been displaced by the flooding, which has submerged hundreds of villages in swaths of the northern Philippines. About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the archipelago nation or its surrounding waters each year, damaging homes and infrastructure and killing dozens of people.

A recent study showed that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change. — AFP