Philippine villagers began to bury their dead in a mass grave today as rescuers pulled only corpses from an entombed community of 1,800 crushed under metres of mud by a landslide.
Two days after the landslide, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said mass graves, peppered with lime powder, were necessary to prevent disease spreading in the hot, fetid conditions.
Rescue workers battled deep, shifting mud and recurring rain in a despairing search for 253 schoolchildren and staff buried after the elementary school in Guinsaugon, a village about 675 km (420 miles) southeast of Manila, was engulfed in Friday's mudslide.
Unconfirmed reports that some of the pupils had sent desperate text messages initially boosted the emergency services but as light faded, so had all hope.
By early evening, 68 bodies had been extricated from the reddish soil and a further 941 villagers were unaccounted for, a spokeswoman for the National Disaster Coordinating Council said.
In a local hospital, survivors told of jumping from roofs to safe ground to escape the torrent of mud, which was triggered by two weeks of heavy rain. One six-year-old girl clung to a coconut tree.
Around 2,000 people from nearby villages were evacuated over the weekend as Defence Secretary Avelino Cruz warned that a similar catastrophe could strike again because rains triggered by the La Nina wet weather pattern were expected to last until June.
Last night, another landslide killed 4 adults and 1 child in Zamboanga City on the southern island of Mindanao.
In Guinsaugon, hundreds of rescue workers, backed by 30 US marines dispatched from annual Philippine military exercises, were warned to tread gingerly in the soft mud or risk drowning. Rain resumed in late afternoon and a no-fly zone was established over the area to prevent blasts of air from helicopters' rotors pushing another layer of mud over the submerged village.
Apart from some iron sheeting, other debris and a lone hut, there was little evidence a village once stood there.
Firefighters, volunteers and soldiers relied on sketches from survivors to pinpoint where the school and other buildings were.
Two US naval ships with 17 helicopters and nearly 1,000 soldiers were expected to arrive off the coast late today.
Leyte province, where Guinsaugon is situated, is no stranger to disaster. In 1991, more than 5,000 died in floods triggered by a typhoon.