"I don't think we can find anybody alive," said Felix Lim, vice-mayor of St Bernard, which includes the now obliterated village on the central island of Leyte.

"The mud is just too deep," he said. "That's the hard truth we have to face."

Health department official Cornelio Solis, asked by AFP if anyone could have survived, said: "By this time I don't think so. There is no way they could survive this by now.

"I have been to ground zero, and there is water and mud seeping through."

US Marines arrived at the scene Sunday along with a Malaysian medical team, part of an international outpouring of aid and sympathy for the disaster-prone nation.

Communist guerrillas active throughout Leyte promised in a statement not to attack the American forces as long as they stay within the disaster area.

President Gloria Arroyo insisted she had not given up hope. "All government resources are continuously being exhausted as we continue to hope to find more survivors," she said.

The head of the rescue effort, Major General Bonifacio Ramos, said the soft mud made it impossible to get heavy equipment onto the site, where an entire school with 200 students and 40 teachers was among buildings buried.

"The mud is like quicksand," Ramos said. "We can't move very fast and it's very difficult." In some places the soil was said to be 30 metres (100 feet) thick.

Work stopped Sunday as night fell since lighting at the scene has not yet been installed.

After two weeks of abnormally heavy rain, the mountainside collapsed onto the village on Friday morning, covering an area of nine square kilometers (3.5 square miles) with mud and huge boulders.

Rescue efforts were focused on the presumed site of the elementary school and the village hall, but progress was slow.

"We need special drilling equipment to detect if there is still signs of life underneath," said Ramos. A specialist Taiwan rescue team was due to arrive later.

Relatives clung to fading hopes.

"My family, where is my family? I know they are there," wept Elsa Timbang, scrutinising lists of survivors in vain. The nanny returned from Britain to her home village on hearing news of the disaster.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council said 65 bodies had been recovered, 20 people were rescued injured from the scene and 410 people who were away from the village at the time also survived.

About 1,400 remain missing based on the latest population estimate for Guinsaugon, although some local officials put the figure much higher.

Provincial governor Rosette Lerias said she was still hopeful but added: "If we don't find anything we have done everything humanly possible."

The bodies of 29 unidentified victims were to be buried in a mass grave Sunday for health reasons. Some lay in crude plywood coffins or body bags after the nearby town of St Bernard ran out of proper coffins.

Arroyo has warned that the Philippines could face more landslides amid forecasts of further heavy rain and promised to help threatened areas adopt safety precautions.

Eleven villages near Guinsaugon have been evacuated.

Underscoring the danger, 10 people were missing and feared dead after a landslide struck a village on the southern island of Mindanao late Saturday following heavy rain.

A 50-strong contingent of US Marines arrived late Saturday from Japan and some inspected the village Sunday to assess needs.

"This is total devastation, it's just acres and acres of mud and rock and that is all you see," said Lieutenant Joel Coots.

Two US landing craft have been sent to the island with relief supplies while two US helicopters delivered supplies to St Bernard.

related report

Asia Must Improve Landslide Warning Systems: Researcher
Singapore (AFP) Feb 19 - Asian nations must improve warning systems and disaster management to confront an increasing number of tragedies linked to heavy rains like the deadly Philippines landslide, a top researcher says.

"In general we are observing more and more heavy rain-associated disasters in the region," said Srikantha Herath, of the environment and sustainable development program at United Nations University in Tokyo.

"So it is necessary to look for measures to anticipate and warn in advance," he told AFP in a telephone interview.

An estimated 1,400 people were missing and feared dead after a massive landslide unleashed a sea of mud that buried the Philippines farming village of Guinsaugon in the south of Leyte island on Friday, officials said.

Defence Secretary Avelino Cruz said 500 millimeters (20 inches) of rain had fallen in the area since February 1, nearly five times the average for the month.

"Leyte island is prone to extreme rainfall," said Herath, noting that in this case, even a mild earthquake like the 2.6-magnitude tremor that hit before the tragedy could have been enough to shake loose the rain-soaked earth.

Southeast Asia has seen an increased intensity of rainfall and, in some cases, the rains are coming later, Herath said. But the region lacks data on these tropical downpours, which could help prevent future tragedies.

"Disasters are very complex... It's a combination of tiny little things that create natural disasters," said Herath, a civil engineer.

"In order to prevent them we really have to improve our monitoring ability tremendously."

Officials and activists have often blamed deadly landslides on deforestation and the encroachment of settlement onto sensitive lands.

Pakistan's Environment Minister Tahir Iqbal, speaking after an October 8 quake killed nearly 74,000 people, blamed most of the deaths on landslides.

"It was the landslides which wiped villages off the face of the earth," Iqbal said, calling for urgent reforestation in the quake zone. "Areas where there were forests, landslides did not occur."

Indonesia has endured an increasing number of landslides, including a disaster in January which killed 75 people on the densely populated island of Java.

Landslides and flash floods are "mainly related to the fact that forest resources have been heavily depleted... reducing the capacity of forest eco-systems in terms of regulating water supply," Togu Manurung from Forest Watch Indonesia told AFP.

Chalid Muhammad, of the environmental group Wahli, said rapid development over the past decade, particularly on volcanic Java, was to blame for a rising number of natural disasters. "Forest is increasingly lost, and wetlands cleared for housing, golf courses, and malls. So when it rains in those areas it floods, or in higher areas there are landslides," he said.

Ten years ago in Malaysia, heavy rains and mudslides in two separate incidents killed more than 245 people.

Colin Nicholas, coordinator with the Centre for Orang Asli (Native People) Concerns, said the government blamed one of those tragedies on shifting cultivation, but he believed it was due to upstream logging, both legal and illegal.

In mountainous Vietnam, landslides which have killed dozens at a time are mostly caused by heavy rain but forest destruction is also a major factor, said an official at the national flood and storm control committee.

Philippine officials say the natural forest cover of southern Leyte, which would have helped prevent erosion, has been largely replaced by coconut plantations, while more than a million people have encroached on vulnerable upland areas.

But Herath said deforestation and urbanization are not really the causes of deadly landslides.

Rather, the climate, geology and geography in a place like Leyte make it susceptible to disaster, and a lack of other suitable living space forces people to face the danger, he said.

More than 5,000 people were killed in a combined flood and mudslide on Leyte in 1991. The landslide-prone island sits on a geological fault and features narrow, flat coastal areas with a mountainous interior.

That is why the focus must be on development of warning systems and risk identification, along with efforts to mitigate the threat, Herath said.

In one such effort, a Filipino man has developed a way to turn lowly coconut husks into a tough, biodegradable netting, the "coconet", to anchor the soil on slopes and riverbanks. The product is in widespread use all over the Philippines as well as in China and Sri Lanka.

"There is indeed a need for this low-cost retaining but most important is to provide adequate drainage," Herath said.

Crucial, too, is the approach to disaster management. Herath says Japan has taken the right path with a permanent team of disaster management officials from various departments working at the cabinet office level.

"Disaster management has to be given a high priority," Herath said.

Regional governments have taken some initial steps toward heeding Herath's advice.

The Vietnamese official said his country plans more centres to provide rainfall information for early forecast and evacuation of those at risk.

In the Philippines, officials launched a geo-hazard mapping project on Leyte following a series of deadly landslides on an adjacent island in 2003.

Indonesian activist Muhammad said the government mapped out the archipelago's most disaster-prone areas in 1990, but it never developed a system to warn residents if they might be at risk.

"There is a real need to act as soon as possible on these issues," Herath warned.

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