LONDON (AlertNet) - Destroyed bridges, blocked roads and the threat of more landslides will hamper sending urgent aid to people hit by a powerful typhoon in the north of the Philippines, aid agencies have said.
Typhoon Parma - the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines since 2006 - landed in the north-east of the country a week after Typhoon Ketsana hit Manila, killing 300 people and forcing thousands to flee their homes.
About 1.8 million people live in Typhoon Parma's path, the United Nations have said, an area renowned for its rugged mountains and isolated farming communities.
"The biggest problems are landslides, and there have been major bridges washed away," Filomena Partales, communications director at World Vision in the Philippines, said by telephone from Manila.
"It is also going to be tough getting accurate information of the damage."
Helicopter assessment teams had scoured the area on Sunday and the first aid convoys would try to reach the region by road from Manila at the start of next week, Partales said.
Local authorities have reported that the typhoon killed about 17 people although the death toll is likely to rise as information filters in.
"The destruction to our infrastructure and agriculture is huge," said Alvaro Antonio, the governor of the northern Cagayan province which bore the brunt of the storm.
"Wide areas are still under water, including ricelands about to be harvested."
But the devastation was less than feared as the storm missed Manila, already flooded by Typhoon Ketsana.
Angela Travis, communications director for the UNICEF office in the Philippines, said relief work to help about 500,000 people living in emergency accommodation around Manila would restart on Monday.
"Many will leave over the next two weeks but a core number of about 150,000 people will probably stay because they are in too bad a state to move or their homes have been washed away," she said.
Most of these people are living in crowded and noisy gymnasiums, town halls or schools with limited fresh water supply and sanitation, making the spread of disease one of UNICEF's main concerns, Travis said.
Typhoon Ketsana smashed through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after storming through the Philippines and killed about 100 more people. It was the first of a series of natural disasters to befall the Asia-Pacific region in about a week.
A tsunami battered the Pacific islands of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga, killing nearly 150 people and on Wednesday and Thursday two powerful earthquakes hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra and killed several thousand.
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