LONDON (AlertNet) - A second strong typhoon in a week has hit the Philippines, destroying infrastructure and villages in the north but missing Manila, the capital city already weakened by heavy flooding.
Typhoon Parma smashed through a mountainous region on the northeastern tip of the archipelago where the United Nations said about 1.8 million people lived in the storm's path.
Angela Travis, head of communications at UNICEF in the Philippines, told AlertNet by telephone from Manila that many of the villages were extremely isolated and that there would be casualties.
"This is an area renowned for landslides," she said. "There were extremely high winds and we expect damage to be significant."
The winds and rain brought down telephone lines, toppled buildings, flooded rivers and swept away roads in the area that Travis said would not be accessible by road for days.
"One of the biggest difficulties will be getting access and information," she said.
But the typhoon - graded a level 4, one level down from the maximum - missed Manila, which took the brunt of Typhoon Ketsana a week earlier.
Ketsana had killed about 300 people in the Philippines and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes before smashing its way through Vietnam and Laos.
There had been warnings that the tail-end of Typhoon Parma would lash rain down on the capital and worsen flooding.
In Manila, Glenn Quirino Maboloc, OxfamÂ?s information officer in the Philippines, said the rain had eased and relief operations for the flooding from Typhoon Ketsana would resume.
"People worried that the typhoon would also hit Manila but it seems as if it has missed," she said. "It's certainly not as tense here now as yesterday."
Typhoon Parma was the strongest storm to hit the Philippines since 2006. It was the latest in a string of disasters to hit Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in the past week, including a devastating earthquake on IndonesiaÂ?s Sumatra island and a quake-triggered tsunami in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.
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