'He saved us, and then he was gone'
18-year-old rescues 30 people in Manila floods, then disappears in torrent
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Maria Luz Magallanes, top right, grieves beside the coffin of her son, Muelmar, whose heroic efforts saved the lives of 30 people from the flooding
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When the river near his Manila home burst its banks, Muelmar Luz Magallanes tied a rope around his waist and ferried his three younger siblings to safety. Then he went back for his parents, then for his neighbours, trapped on rooftops. Finally, Mr Magallanes rescued a six-month-old baby who was being swept away on a polystyrene box. But the young man paid for his heroic deeds with his life.
As the Philippines appealed for international aid yesterday, with the death toll from Tropical Storm Ketsana and devastating floods rising to 140, Mr Magallanes' family mourned their courageous son.
The 18-year-old construction worker saved more than 30 lives, including that of the baby and her mother, Menchie Penalosa. "He gave his life for my baby. I will never forget his sacrifice," said Mrs Penalosa.
Last weekend's storm unleashed the heaviest rains for more than four decades on the Philippine capital and surrounding areas. Yesterday emergency workers struggled through knee-deep mud and putrid water in a desperate effort to help people still stranded.
Among those saved was Christine Reyes, a popular Philippine actress, who was
marooned on a rooftop with her mother and two young children as the
floodwaters rose.
In an ending worthy of one of her movies, Reye's rescuer was Richard Gutierrez, a film and TV heart-throb who borrowed an army speedboat and whisked her to safety.
The story – which is already being retold endlessly by movie-besotted Filipinos – began when Reyes, trapped by Ketsana, used her mobile phone to call a television station to make a frantic plea for help. "If the rains do not stop, the water will reach the roof," she said, weeping. "We do not know what to do. My mother doesn't know how to swim."
Gutierrez, a close friend and Reyes's co-star in an upcoming film, sped to the
rescue. "We couldn't go fast because of the strong current and floating
cars," he said yesterday. On reaching her house, he struggled to tie
the boat to a tree amid the churning waters, then climbed up to the roof.
Reyes said: "I thought it was our ending, but I did not lose hope."
Saturday's storm dumped nearly 17 inches of rain in just 12 hours, inundating tens of thousands of houses and forcing residents to seek refuge in schools, churches and evacuation shelters. It also set off landslides that proved deadly. The extent of the destruction became clear yesterday as the floodwaters receded, leaving behind villages covered in mud and communities without water, food or power. In one Manila suburb, a sofa hung from overhead power wires.
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Comments
-Jessica
is to do necesssary reforestation projects all over the country. Landslides, which are sadly common, and which take many lives in the Philippines, are caused by the cutting down, as well as, burning, of
trees. Even without severe typhoons, tragedies like these take place more often than are reported in
the international press.
The Indy is not allowing any comments under its Iran war propaganda, well aware of the utter mendaciousness of its allegations that would collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
The latest allegations of Iranian nuke foul play are a pile of horse manure no less foul than Mr. Bush's Iraq WMD or Tony Bliar's "45-minute" fast-order WMD. They are a pile of manure stovepiped, as was the Iraq WMD BS, by Tel Aviv directly to the Likud Party's franchisees in Washington, Hillary and Hussein, entirely bypassing the CIA, which keeps telling the misleader-in-chief that Iran has shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the end.
Barack Obomber now boogies to "bomb bomb bomb Iran" as well as to "I see the light at the end of the Khyber Pass." He lies with the ease of Dick Cheney, telling us that Iran's new pilot plant is a "secret facility" after Iran declared it by the book to the IAEA and invited it to set up 24/7 monitoring there.
He tells us Iran is making bomb material there when the plant is designed to produce 5% enriched uranium at best and the IAEA's cameras and telemetry is going to make sure it doesn't go beyond that, 75% short of bomb-grade uranium.
He wants us to believe that Iran builds its nuke plants underground so we can't find them when the obvious reason the plants are underground is that the Israelis are stockpiling bunker-busters and conducting full-scale aerial bombing exercises and would have already done the real thing if Admiral Fallon hadn't put his CENTCOM job on the line and stopped them.