Disaster Agencies sent on Monday, sleeping bags, food, water and medicine to evacuation centers in the southern Philippines, as officials ordered to dig graves to prevent disease after hundreds of people died by flooding.
The national disaster agency said 684 people died after Typhoon Washi hit the island of Mindanao over the weekend at a time when residents were sleeping, causing water and mud floods that devastated coastal towns and houses swept into the sea.
The Philippine National Red Cross said the death toll is 652 people, with more than 800 missing. This number exceeds the 464 killed in 2009 when a tropical storm caused heavy rain on the island of Luzon, flooding most of the capital, Manila.
The head of the national disaster agency, Benito Ramos, had suggested digging mass graves to prevent outbreak of diseases, but the two big cities that were most affected by the climatic phenomenon took various decisions.
Iligan officials said they could bury some 80 bodies on Monday in a public cemetery, but plots and individual graves. The workers were rushing to build the tombs.
"Definitely, we are not buried in mass graves. This is no longer allowed," he told Reuters Levi Villarin, health officer of the city.
In Cagayan de Oro, officials moved hundreds of bodies unclaimed for a sanitary landfill for a mass burial after residents complained of the stench.
"They (local officials) have to bury these decomposing bodies because they can not be recognized and are avoiding a possible outbreak of diseases," said Ramos.
Eman Vincent, Mayor of Cagayan de Oro, said authorities were planning to put some bodies in refrigeration trucks to government agencies to identify the dead with DNA testing and fingerprinting.
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Philippines Dig graves after typhoon death toll rises to 684 »
Philippines Dig graves after typhoon death toll rises to 684