Agencies/Manila

President Aquino yesterday visited Casiguran town where typhoon Koppu made landfall.
Instead of visiting Baler as initially scheduled, Aquino went to Casiguran where he led a ceremonial turnover of relief goods for typhoon survivors.
For over an hour, the president received updates from his cabinet members and local government leaders on relief and rehabilitation efforts in Aurora.
He also gave instructions and guidelines in response to the reports he got from local government officials who said the typhoon brought P578mn in total damage to infrastructure and agriculture throughout the province.
In the same Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (PDRRMC) briefing, the president instructed the local leaders to stop residents from using overhead power lines from fallen electric posts to dry their clothes.
“I’ve noticed that some residents are using the power lines to dry their clothes. Please make sure they are no longer using these damaged power lines before restoring the electricity to avoid casualty,” Aquino told local officials.
Casiguran mayor Ricardo Bitong reported that 93% of his constituents have been affected by Typhoon Lando.
Because of the cooperation of all the barangay (village) leaders and the people as well, the typhoon left only three casualties in the province of Aurora, according to its governor, Gerardo Noveras.
”We have 42 injured people while 14,536 houses were [partly] damaged and 1,924 were totally damaged,” Noveras reported to the president.
He said the typhoon also left P22mn worth of damage from fallen electric poles.
The president distributed relief goods and inspected damaged infrastructure before attending the PDRRMC briefing at the municipal hall of Casiguran.
He then inspected damaged infrastructure including Saint Anthony de Padua Church, Casiguran public market, Agricula covered court, Casiguran District Hospital and Tinib Calangwasan Integrated School.
Aquino was accompanied by public works and highways secretary Rogelio Singson, social welfare secretary Corazon Soliman, agriculture secretary Proceso Alcala, health secretary Janet Garin, education secretary Armin Luistro and interior secretary Mel Sarmiento.
Also joining the president were senator Juan Edgardo Angara, Aurora represenative Bella Angara-Castillo, National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council executive director Alexander Pama and armed forces chief of staff general Hernando Iriberri.
From Casiguran, the president went to Pangasinan to inspect typhoon-stricken areas in the province and some parts of Central Luzon.
Last Monday, Aquino handed out relief goods to displaced families in Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija.
He was initially scheduled to visit the provincial capital, Baler, on Thursday where Liberal Party (LP) candidates Manuel Roxas 2nd and Camarines Sur represenative Leni Robredo previously distributed relief goods to typhoon victims.
Baler Mayor Nelianto Bihasa, who is not affiliated with the LP, complained that there was politics involved in the visit of Roxas and Robredo since the relief goods did not pass through him.
Malacanang responded on Wednesday, saying the relief goods were meant for typhoon victims, not for Bihasa.
It said the government will help typhoon-hit provinces regardless of political affiliations.
Damage to agriculture and infrastructure caused by Typhoon Lando has reached P7.3bn, according to latest official numbers.
Production losses in the agriculture and fisheries sector have reached P6.43bn while the damage to infrastructure has amounted to P902.4mn, according to the NDRRMC.
The death toll from a ferocious typhoon in the Philippines climbed to over 50 yesterday, as home-wrecking floods shifted downstream to coastal villages, displacing tens of thousands of residents.
Inundations from torrential weekend rains in mountain regions caused by typhoon Koppu cascaded into coastal fishing and farming villages, submerging them in waters up to 3m deep, officials said.
Residents of Bulacan and Pampanga province, around two hours’ drive from the capital Manila, fled by foot to evacuation centres as the waters rose quickly overnight, aggravated by a high tide, they said.
“The waters have nowhere else to go. Imagine two to three days worth of rain from the mountains coming down,” Nigel Lontoc, assistant director of the region’s civil defence office, told AFP.
Close to 60,000 people left their homes in Bulacan and Pampanga, a geographic catch basin for waters from the upland provinces of Nueva Ecija and Aurora, which bore the brunt of Koppu on Sunday and Monday.
Lontoc said the floods in the coastal areas may last a week.
Koppu made landfall on the east coast of Luzon, the Philippines’ biggest and most populated island, early Sunday with 210kph per hour winds.
Koppu, the second strongest typhoon to hit the disaster-weary country this year, then crawled over vast swathes of Luzon for three days, bringing torrential rains that triggered landslides and massive flooding.
A report from the national disaster monitoring office said close to 500,000 people had been displaced by flooding.
The waters had receded considerably in the upland provinces and many had returned to their mud-covered homes.
But the death toll climbed to 54, from 47 on Wednesday, based on an AFP tally of confirmed figures from national and local authorities.
In the Cordillera mountain region, the civil defence office confirmed five more deaths from landslides on Monday and Tuesday, raising the death toll to 21 from 16 on Wednesday.
In the central farming regions of Luzon, the deaths of two 12-year-old girls were reported, one of whom died from drowning and the other from a snake bite, according to the regional civil defence office.
Koppu had weakened into a low pressure area on Thursday, bringing moderate rains over the outlying Batanes islands in the far north of the Philippines, state weather forecaster Gener Quitlong told AFP.
The Philippines is battered by an average 20 typhoons a year, many of them deadly.
In November 2013, 7,350 people were left dead or missing after the most powerful storm on record, Haiyan, wiped out entire communities in the central islands.