The destruction from Typhoon Bopha in portions of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, is worse than feared as rescue workers continued to discover bodies under knee-deep mud, said a Catholic Relief Services official who coordinates the agency’s storm response in early December. “It looks like a tsunami hit. It’s just complete and total destruction. Whole hillsides were washed away in flash floods,” said Joe Curry, the C.R.S. country representative. “The staff there have been through a half dozen typhoons and floods in the Philippines, and they say this is probably the worst,” Curry added. Typhoon Bopha made landfall on the east coast of Mindanao on Dec. 4, lashing the island with 120-mph winds and torrential rains. Curry said that a C.R.S. team reached New Bataan, a city of about 80,000 in the Compostela Valley, on Dec. 6 and found much of the community under mud and without electricity. At press time the death toll was more than 700 and expected to climb higher.
Typhoon Recovery
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Engagement with Catholic schools can help seminarians enter ministry with a clearer sense of the pastoral needs of their flock.
“This is a day of gratitude for El Paso, the work of Annunciation House and the resilience of our community’s hospitality workers,” Bishop Mark J. Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso said in a statement.
Vulnerability, defined as the capacity the human being has to be open and responsive to another human being, is a central mark of what makes us human.
Tom Wolfe would have loved to write about a debate between a billionaire former president who is also a convicted felon and an octogenarian sitting president whose public mental lapses are vociferously denied by many of his own confidantes.