Guwahati News Desk: Due to the heavy monsoon rains, Philippine authorities moved thousands of residents in the capital, Manila, out of the low-lying communities on Saturday.
As per the reports, the tropical storms and heavy rains ended up flooding the entire city and its nearby provinces.
The national disaster agency informed that about 15,000 people, most of them from a flood-prone Manila suburb, had moved into the evacuation centers.
The meteorologists have stated that the Philippines, a Southeast Asian archipelago of more than 7,600 islands, is hit by about 20 tropical storms a year, but a warmer Pacific Ocean will make the storms more powerful and bring heavier rain.
The presidential spokesperson, Harry Roque, informed that the public works ministry was busy on Saturday clearing debris and landslides from roads in the provinces.
Sources have also stated that in some parts of the Philippine capital region (an urban sprawl of more than 13 million people), flood waters rose waist-high in places and cut off roads to light vehicles.
The governor of Oriental Mindoro province, Humerlito Dolor, told DZMM radio station, “Some houses were flooded up to the roof.”
Meanwhile, Philippines is also grappling with one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in Asia and has tightened curbs to prevent the spread of the more infectious Delta variant. Infact, with more than 1.54 million cases and 27,131 deaths, the Philippines has the second highest number of COVID-19 infections and fatalities in Southeast Asia, after Indonesia.
The prevailing harsh weather has hit nearly all corners of the globe in the recent weeks, bringing floods to China, India and Western Europe and heat waves to North America, heightening fears about the impact of climate change.
Photo | Reuters