Death toll in Philippine storm rises to 100

Rescuers in the Philippines have been diving into a lake and scouring isolated villages to locate dozens of missing people as the death toll from Tropical Storm Trami hit 100.

Trami, which rammed into the Philippines on 24 October, was among the deadliest storms to hit the Southeast Asian country this year.

According to the national disaster agency, it forced more than half a million people to flee their homes and at least 36 people remain missing.

Police in the hardest-hit Bicol region have recorded 38 deaths, most due to drowning.

The death toll in Batangas, south of Manila, has risen to 55, provincial police chief Jacinto Malinao told journalists.

Two were reported dead in separate incidents of electrocution and drowning in Cavite province, police said.

Five more bodies were recovered in other provinces, bringing the total to 100, according to an AFP tally based on official police and disaster agency sources.

"A higher death toll is possible in the coming days since rescuers can now reach previously isolated places," Edgar Posadas of the Civil Defence Office said.

Most of the deaths in Batangas have been attributed to rain-induced landslides.

More than 20 bodies were pulled from heaps of mud, boulders and fallen trees, while police said at least another 20 people in the province are still missing.

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The national disaster agency said that about 560,000 people had been displaced by floods, which submerged hundreds of villages in swaths of the northern Philippines.

About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the archipelago nation or its surrounding waters each year, damaging homes and infrastructure and killing dozens of people.

A recent study showed that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change.