Manila: Residents of Kuseong village of Philippines mistook the storm which caused massive destruction in the country as a tsunami, due to which they ran towards a high place towards the mountain and then got buried alive there. An official gave this information on Sunday. He said the villagers got this misunderstanding because Kuseong had earlier suffered a devastating tsunami.
Rescuers have so far retrieved at least 18 bodies from a swath of mud in the village of Kuseong in the southern province of Maguindanao, one of the worst affected by tropical storm Nalge, which devastated the northwest coast. Najib Sinarimbo, the interior minister of the autonomous region of five Muslim provinces ruled by former guerrilla extremists, said officials feared 80 to 100 people have swept away or buried in floodwaters in Kuseong village between Thursday night and early Friday.
At least 50 people died in the Philippines during ‘Nalge’. The people of Kuseong village are also among those who lost their lives. At the same time, this storm left a lot of destruction in the Philippines, one of the most vulnerable countries in terms of disaster. The disaster is even more tragic for Kuseong village, a densely populated area of the ‘Tedure’ ethnic minority, as more than 2,000 of its villagers have been preparing for disaster management every year for decades to avert a tsunami. This village has also been a witness to the deadly devastation due to the tsunami.
Sinarimbo said the villagers, however, could not foresee the threat from Mount Minder. He told the Associated Press, quoting residents of Kuseong, “When people heard the sound of the warning bell, they started running and gathered in a high-rise church. But it was not the tsunami that would have drowned them. Rather it was a great flood of water and mud, which had come down from the mountain.” Sinarimbo said that this one misunderstanding cost the lives of dozens of villagers. The village of Kuseong lies between the Gulf of Moro and the Minder Mountains. The tsunami that followed a magnitude 8.1 earthquake in and around Morro Bay in August 1976 caused massive destruction, killing thousands.
