Updated at 5.50pm
THE DEATH TOLL from a tropical storm in the southern Philippines has risen to 182, police say.
Tropical Storm Tembin has lashed the nation’s second-largest island of Mindanao since yesterday, triggering flash floods and mudslides.
The Philippines is pummelled by 20 major storms each year on average, many of them deadly.
But Mindanao, home to 20 million people, is rarely hit by these cyclones.
Rescuers retrieved at least 36 bodies from the Salog River in Mindanao today, as officials reported more fatalities in the impoverished Zamboanga peninsula.
The bodies were swept downriver from a flooded town upstream called Salvador, Rando Salvacion, the Sapad town police chief, told AFP. Authorities in Salvador said they had retrieved 17 other bodies upstream.
Salvador and Sapad are in Lanao del Norte, which is one of the provinces hardest hit by Tembin.
Typhoon Haiyan
Tembin struck less than a week after Tropical Storm Kai-Tak left 54 people dead and 24 missing in the central Philippines.
The deadliest typhoon to hit the country was Haiyan, which killed thousands of people and destroyed entire towns in heavily populated areas of the central Philippines in November 2013.
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