Flashfloods hit Maguindanao

SULTAN KUDARAT, Maguindanao — Flashfloods, spawned by heavy rains, struck farming communities here and nearby towns yesterday, displacing more than 10,000 villagers and devastating some 20,000 hectares of rice and corn farms.

Most of the local residents affected by the floods are now housed in relief sites in nearby Cotabato City.

Sultan Kudarat Mayor Datu Tucao Mastura, chairman of the Municipal Disaster Coordinating Council, said rivers criss-crossing the six flooded barangays overflowed after three days of torrential rains in surrounding hinterland towns, inundating more than a dozen villages.

Mastura said the flashflood destroyed some P20 million worth of rice and corn crops in this town alone.

"Some farmers lost their farm animals when the flashflood hit their villages," Mastura added.

Elsie Amil, provincial chief of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), said that just last week, more than a thousand families, or about 7,000 people, have been displaced by a knee-deep flood that hit Barangays Banobo and Katuli here, both traversed by tributaries of the Rio Grande de Mindanao river.

"The situation here worsened when the flood, due to continuing heavy rains, inundated more villages. People have to be evacuated to higher grounds," Amil said.

Local officials in Maguindanao’s Kabuntalan town, some 30 kilometers east of the flooded communities here, said flashfloods also hit yesterday more than a dozen areas within their jurisdiction and displaced more than a thousand Muslim villagers.