Sawt Falasteen - Typhoon Man-yi bears down on Philippines still reeling from Usagi

Five major storms have battered the archipelago nation in the last three weeks, killing at least 163 people and prompting the United Nations to request $32.9 million in aid for the worst-affected regions.

Typhoon Usagi hit the north of the country on Thursday, and on Friday rescuers were still scrambling to reach residents stranded on rooftops in northern Luzon island, where herds of livestock were devastated.

At the same time authorities began evacuating hundreds of people from the island of Catanduanes, which will likely be the first landmass hit directly by Typhoon Man-yi on Saturday, according to the weather service.

"We expect thousands more to evacuate in the hours before landfall, Roberto Monterola, operations chief of the Catanduanes civil defence office told AFP.

"We do not have enough evacuation centres, so some of them will be sheltering with neighbours who own houses made of stronger materials."

- Digging for cattle -

On Thursday, flash floods driven by Usagi struck 10 largely evacuated villages around the town of Gonzaga in Cagayan province, local rescue official Edward Gaspar told AFP by phone.

"We rescued a number of people who had refused to move to the shelters and got trapped on their rooftops," Gaspar added.

While the evacuation of more than 5,000 Gonzaga residents ahead of Usagi saved lives, he said two houses were swept away and many others were damaged while the farming region's livestock industry took a heavy blow.

"We have yet to account for the exact number of hogs, cattle and poultry lost from the floods, but I can say the losses were huge," Gaspar said.

Motorist Janford Bonifacio said he saw Gonzaga residents digging for their animals, many dead but some still alive, beneath mud and uprooted trees.

"I saw people digging for their cattle that were still alive, and some were trying to save their hogs which they found among the logs," he told AFP.

Uprooted trees also damaged a major bridge in Gonzaga, isolating nearby Santa Ana, a coastal town of about 36,000 people.

"Most evacuees have returned home, but we held back some of them. We have to check first if their houses are still safe for habitation," Bonifacio Espiritu, operations chief of the civil defence office in Cagayan, told AFP.

By Friday, Usagi, now downgraded to a severe tropical storm, was over the Luzon Strait with a reduced strength of 110 kilometres (68 miles) an hour as it headed towards southern Taiwan.

But the streak of violent weather was forecast to continue in the central Philippines, with Man-yi, reclassified as a typhoon and already packing winds of up to 150 kilometres an hour, expected to hit the impoverished island province of Catanduanes late Saturday.

- 207,000 houses hit -

A UN assessment said the past month's storms damaged or destroyed 207,000 houses, with 700,000 people forced to seek temporary shelter.

Many families were without essentials like sleeping mats, hygiene kits and cooking supplies, and had limited access to safe drinking water.

Thousands of hectares of farmland were destroyed and persistent flooding was likely to delay replanting efforts and worsen food supply problems, the report added.

About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the Southeast Asian nation or its surrounding waters each year, killing scores of people, but it is unusual for multiple such weather events to take place in a small window.

The weather service said this tends to happen during seasonal episodes of La Nina, a climatic phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that pushes more warm water toward Asia, causing heavy rains and flooding in the region and drought in the southern United States.

V.AbuAwwad--SF-PST