Just out on the
news is that 146 people were killed from landslides caused by Durian on Mount Mayon, south of Manilla. Also in the article:
On the island of Marinduque, trees were uprooted, lamp posts wrenched out and roofs swept from homes.
"It's the worst in our history. Almost all houses were damaged by the typhoon in the province," Congressman Edmund Reyes said on local radio.
As news trickles in over the next couple days, it looks like the country will have taken a very hard hit from this typhoon. Another
news article lists over 100 dead, but only 20 of those were from the mudslide. The islands that were in the initial path of the typhoon, that took the highest winds, appear to have been practically leveled:
Fernando Gonzales, governor of badly hit Albay province, said 108 bodies had been found but that recovery operations were continuing. The figure did not include at least one person killed in adjacent Camarines Sur province, which reported that its capital was flattened.
Undersecretary Dr. Graciano Yumul of the Department of Science and Technology said the storm was particularly damaging because wind gusts hit 165 mph when Durian came ashore Thursday in Catanduanes, an island province with no mountains to break the storm’s momentum.
“So it really destroyed the island that it hit,†Yumul said.
The Philippine web site, Typhoon2000, reported that as the eye passed over Virac there were gusts of 265 kph (roughly 145 kt, or 165 mph).
After emerging into the South China sea, microwave passes showed that Durien still had some notable organization -- an eye and partial eyewall remained -- but water vapor imagery showed dry air repeatedly slicing into the storm, and so basically it is done and will spin down over the next couple days.
Fri aft -- news continues to be quite horrible. No one has been able to get to what is likely the hardest-hit island, Catanduanes. They undoubtably took the highest winds, from the northern eyewall, when Durian had just about finished an ERC, the eye was clearing out, and it was still intensifying.
I also found out that the Bicol area of Albay, which includes Mount Mayon, where the lahars occured, is one of the poorer areas, so I'm sure many of the buildings were not of the type that were built to a building code to withstand typhoons, although there were some concrete structures for this purpose. Unfortunately people in the path of the lahar were trapped in those concrete buildings. I read that Mount Mayon is around 2500m, and since the highest winds are usually around 500m (the avg dropsounde profile), it's no wonder that the mudslides occured, between the extensive rain (they received on the order of 20 inches of rain) and the winds -- and that day's high-res vis sat image showed the area where the volcano is located was under a convective burst in the southwestern eyewall as the storm moved inland.
