A three-year-old girl has been rescued from a landslide in southern Philippines sixty hours after she was buried.
Rescuers had given up hope of finding more survivors, and hailed the rescue of the child on Friday as “a miracle”.
The landslide took place near a gold mining village of Masara in the Davao de Oro province in the Mindanao region on Tuesday.
Officials say 28 people have died and about 77 others are missing.
Photos and video posted on the Philippine Red Cross Facebook page on Friday show rescue workers carrying the girl, wrapped in an emergency blanket and hooked to an oxygen tank, into a hospital in nearby Mawab municipality.
Edward Macapili, a disaster agency official of the Davao de Oro province, said “it’s a miracle,” adding that searchers had believed those missing were probably dead.
He told AFP: “That gives hope to the rescuers. A child’s resilience is usually less than that of adults, yet the child survived.”
Davao de Oro provincial disaster chief Randy Loy told the news conference: “We’re still hoping to save more people even after four days.”
But he warned that that they “can’t really guarantee their chances of survival” after 48 hours.
The landslide struck Tuesday night, destroying houses and engulfing three buses and a jeepney – a type of minibus – waiting to pick up workers from the gold mine.
Landslides are a frequent hazard across much of the Philippines because of the mountainous terrain, heavy rainfall, and widespread deforestation from mining and illegal logging.
Heavy monsoon rains have pounded parts of Mindanao on and off for weeks, causing landslides and flooding that have forced tens of thousands of people into emergency shelters.
Rescuers were forced to pause their operations when a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck on Saturday.
According to the Philippine Star, no fatalities or injuries have been reported so far from the quake.
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3 December 2023
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