avad

According to New York Times cover story the "The mudslide, which struck without warning Friday morning" is not entirely true... : commercial logging had stripped the mountainside for decades, leaving its topsoil vulnerable. Villagers replanted some of the slopes with coconut trees, which provide food but have only shallow roots. So landslides of one kind or another have become a regular feature of the rainy season, which begins in October. But about a month ago, villagers began to notice something unusual: gashes of brown dirt like cracks in the mountain's face. Nobody considered them serious enough, apparently, to report to the authorities.

"We knew that that part of the mountain had become unstable, but nobody did anything about it," said Marcos Malubay, an official of Atuyon, a village next to Guinsaugon that narrowly avoided the avalanche.
Rev. Francis Vega, of the local Saint Bernard parish, said the mudslide was tragically unsurprising. "There have been warnings about the dangerous degradation of the environment in this province," he said, "warnings that were not heeded by government officials."
read the article: In Philippines, Hope for Survivors Fades