Typhoon Goni: Killed 26 people

Manila

Typhoon Goni killed at least 26 people in landslides and floods in the Philippines, officials said Monday, as the storm bore down on Japan.

Rescue teams clawed away at a mountainside near the remote mining town of Mankayan in the country's north, after recovering the bodies of 13 miners buried by a landslide that struck the area two days earlier.

"The landslide buried miners sheltering in huts used as a rest area. The slope collapsed after being saturated with rain," Ivy Carasi, a spokeswoman for the civil defence office in the region, said. officials did not elaborate on how many miners were still missing in the landslide's wake.

"We don't really know how many more miners are missing because the numbers compiled by the police and local government do not tally," said Carasi.

Goni hit parts of the northern Philippines hard over the weekend, destroying nearly a thousand houses and forcing more than 12,000 people to flee, the civil defence office said. More than a dozen other people in the mountainous region were killed by landslides, surging waters and a falling tree, the civil defence office in Manila added.

Apart from the unspecified number of missing Mankayan miners, four people were still unaccounted for elsewhere in the country, including a five-year-old girl. The child disappeared after a river overflowed and swept away her home near the coastal town of Subic late Sunday, killing her two siblings aged two and nine months, Vic Otero, a local civil defence official, said.

"The family had been advised to evacuate as early as last week. Apparently they did not heed the warning," Otero said, adding their parents survived. Goni is the ninth out of an average of 20 storms that hit the Philippines each year.