Philippine Village Submerged in Mud

I just saw this on the news just now, the whole place seems to have been burried. It has been raining pretty heavily in this region the past few days.

Mud wipes out Philippines village

An entire village has been buried by a major landslide in the central Philippines following heavy rains.

Sixteen people have been confirmed dead so far, but Red Cross officials estimated that 200 might be dead, and said a further 1,500 were missing.

President Gloria Arroyo ordered the coast guard and navy to the island of Leyte and said: "Help is on the way."

Survivor Dario Libatan said: "It sounded like the mountain exploded, and the whole thing crumbled."

I wonder if there's any land development going on near the area that might have destabilized the soil.

Apparantly there was illegal logging going on nearby that might have caused the soil in the area to lose cohession.

[edit - included the bit about illegal logging]

[edit on 17-2-2006 by Beachcoma]

[edit on 17-2-2006 by Beachcoma]

There's a lot of illegal timber cutting, but a large portion of trees in the area are coconut trees. They don't hold the soil well because they have shallow roots. There aren't many deep rooting trees in the Philippines that would hold the soil well.

Really? I thought the plant-life there are not very much different than here in Malaysia, a mix of coconuts, mangrove and tropical rainforest trees like teak and such.

There is some teak, and the shoreline areas have some mangrove, but the mountain areas have a lot of coconut, and several shorter root types of trees. Especially the Leyte area. There is a lot of illegal logging in that area, as well.