Typhoon Man-yi left at least three villagers missing, destroyed houses, knocked out power in entire towns and displaced large numbers of villagers before blowing away from the northern Philippines, worsening the crisis wreaked by five previous storms, officials said Monday.
Man-yi was one of the strongest of the six major storms to hit the northern Philippines in less than a month and had sustained winds of up to 195 kilometers 125 miles per hour when it slammed into the eastern island province of Catanduanes on Saturday night.
Disaster-response officials said they were checking if the deaths of two villagers were directly related to Man-yi's onslaught in eastern Camarines Norte province. They said a search was underway for a couple and their child after their shanty was swept away in rampaging rivers in northern Nueva Ecija province.
More than a million people were affected by the typhoon and two previous storms, including nearly 700,000 who fled their homes and moved to emergency shelters or relatives' homes, according to the Official of Civil Defense.
Nearly 8,000 houses were damaged or destroyed and more than 100 cities and towns were hit by power outages due to toppled electric posts, it said.
