The girl, who the Philippine Red Cross said was three years old, was among dozens of people missing after a rain-triggered landslide hit a village. She was found while rescuers were searching with hands and shovels for survivors in the village of Masara, on the southern island of Mindanao, disaster management agency spokesman Edward Macapili told AFP in Davao de Oro province.
“It’s a miracle,” Makapili said. He said searchers believed the missing people were probably dead. “This gives hope to first responders. The recovery ability of a child is usually less than that of an adult, but the child survived,” she added.
A video of a lifeguard carrying a crying, mud-stained child was posted on Facebook (banned in the Russian Federation; owned by the Meta corporation, recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation). At the same time, the girl’s father saw her daughter even before she was taken to a medical center. The Philippine Red Cross posted on social media photos of its workers carrying a girl wrapped in an emergency blanket and connected to an oxygen tank to a hospital in Mawab township.
The landslide occurred Tuesday afternoon, destroying homes and flooding three buses and jeepneys waiting to pick up gold mine workers. Landslides are a common threat on the archipelago’s islands due to the mountainous terrain, heavy rainfall, and widespread deforestation due to mining, shifting cultivation, and illegal logging. Rains intensified in some parts of Mindanao for weeks, causing dozens of landslides and flooding that forced tens of thousands of people to seek shelter. The area affected by the landslide was declared a “no construction zone” following previous landslides in 2007 and 2008.
The death toll from a landslide in Davao de Oro province rose to 35 on Saturday, with another 77 people still missing.
