Typhoon Goni: Philippines survivor tells of children swept away

Holding his youngest child in one arm, supporting his wife with the other, and his four older children clinging onto his back, Salvador Manrique tried to cross the rising floodwaters.

They had known a super typhoon was coming and early on Sunday were woken by fierce winds and torrential rain.

But the volcanic mudflow triggered by the storm caught them by surprise.

“They were all hugging me,” Mr Manrique told the BBC. “The waters were rushing. It was strong. All of us were swept away.”

The 49-year-old rice and cabbage farmer survived typhoon Goni, known as Rolly in the Philippines, after it barrelled across the nation on 1 November, a day when Catholic Filipinos remember their dead.

But his youngest child – five-year-old Samuel – was carried away by the mudflow, his body found later that day in a neighbouring town 12 miles (19km) away.

His wife and eldest child remain missing.

Sitting next to his son’s coffin, Mr Manrique says he hadn’t anticipated such a flash flood in their hillside village of San Francisco on the island of Luzon.

“We were asked to evacuate but we didn’t leave. I was relaxed since we live in the highlands. The river had never overflowed,” he said.

But as they watched the river outside their bamboo hut surge with rain water as well as humongous rocks from the nearby volcano, he and his wife decided to seek safer ground.

Mr Manrique carried his youngest child, Samuel, 5, on his left arm while his wife, Elvie, was holding his right arm. Four of his children, Michaela, 18, Maria Luisa, 15, Hannah, 10, and Emmanuel, 8, were hugging his back.

They were halfway across the river when the water pulled the family apart.

BBC