Manila: Efforts to rescue victims from the flood tragedy in northern Mindanao continued through the holidays, an official said on Sunday.
Benito Ramos, executive director of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said search and retrieval operations for the victims of the flooding in Iligan City and Cagayan de Oro went on even as most Filipinos went on a holiday to observe the Christmas tradition.
"Instead of drawing down and pausing for rest to observe the holiday, rescue workers will continue looking for survivors and retrieve bodies of victims," Ramos said in a radio interview.
This Christmas, rescue workers in Iligan and Cagayan de Oro cities which were badly hit by the December 17 calamity brought about by typhoon Washi (Philippine codename, "Sendong"), opt that there would be no let up to find survivors or retrieve victims' bodies.
"A single day that we pause looking for survivors could mean the difference in finding on or more of the victims alive," Ramos said.
He added that the scope of the search coverage had been broadened.
Based on the latest figures of the NDRRMC, 1,236 bodies have been recovered from Cagayan de Oro and Iligan cities. Most of these have not been identified.
Earlier, Ramos had said that the number of fatalities had been pegged at 1,079 as most of the victims have yet to be identified.
Dam collapse
Meanwhile, Secretary Mario Montejo of the Department of Science and Technology (Dost) said the government is bent on preventing such calamity from even happening again.
The flashflood that killed and harmed hundreds of people in the northern Mindanao and southern Visayas areas was aggravated by the reported collapse of dams along the Cagayan de Oro River, Montejo said.
"It is most likely that the flashflood in Cagayan de Oro was caused not only simply by the high volume of rain that fell in the watershed of rivers in said places but essentially of the reported collapse of dams at the upper parts of the rivers," he announced.
Reports from the field the collapse of the dams are being investigated, per instructions of President Benigno Aquino III.
The Dost and its attached agency, the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Agency (Pagasa) had been largely blamed for erroneous forecast on the amount of rainfall carried by Washi.
But Montejo said it is not fair to blame the blame squarely on the weather agency for the lives lost. "Pagasa had been doing its job conscientiously," he. "In fact, places such as Bohol, Surigao, and Camiguin that heeded Pagasa's warning and took appropriate actions had mitigated the effects of Sendong."
To further improve its weather forecasting and hazard mitigating capability, Montejo said that Pagasa in 2012 will upgrade monitoring systems.
"We are set to install 1,000 water level sensors in selected major river basins in 2012," Montejo revealed.
