Public works crews went about the slow task of clearing roads cut off by landslides and restoring power and telecommunications facilities in Aurora and Nueva Ecija a day after a tropical depression brought death and destruction to the two northern provinces.

The storm dissipated in the Cordillera mountain range overnight Tuesday, the weather bureau here said.

The coastguard meanwhile pressed on with the increasingly frustrating task of searching for 80 fishermen lost at sea at the height of tropical storm Muifa four days ago.

President Gloria Arroyo, en route to Manila by way of the United States after attending a Pacific Rim summit in Chile and visiting Mexico, is monitoring the rescue, her spokesman Ignacio Bunye told local radio by telephone from Los Angeles.

"The president plans to visit the devastated areas as soon as she arrives" in Manila early Thursday, Bunye added.

The civil defense office said floods and landslides from Wednesday's tropical depression killed 18 people, injured 14 and left six others missing.

Aside from the missing fishermen, Muifa left 61 people dead and injured 101 others before roaring off toward southern Vietnam.

Civil defense official Neri Amparo told AFP other fishermen originally reported missing have been accounted for, but could not say if they were alive or dead.

More than half of the confirmed deaths came from the central islands, at the ports of origin of many of the missing fishermen.

"The coastguard is in charge of the search and rescue. We have not received a report from them that the search is being terminated," Amparo said.

The two storms smashed nearly 34,000 houses and displaced more than 314,000 people, the government agency said.

About 20 typhoons or storms hit the Southeast Asian archipelago every year, claiming an annual average of about 500 lives.

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