Typhoon Goni has killed at least 26 people in landslides and floods in the Philippines, officials say, as the storm bears down on Japan.
Rescue teams clawed away at a mountainside near the remote mining town of Mankayan in the country's north on Monday, after recovering the bodies of 13 miners buried by a landslide that struck the area two days earlier.
"The landslide buried miners sheltering in huts used as a rest area. The slope collapsed after being saturated with rain," Ivy Carasi, a spokeswoman for the civil defence office in the region, told AFP.
Officials did not elaborate on how many miners were still missing in the landslide's wake.
"We don't really know how many more miners are missing because the numbers compiled by the police and local government do not tally," said Carasi.
Goni hit parts of the northern Philippines hard over the weekend, destroying nearly a thousand houses and forcing more than 12,000 people to flee, the civil defence office said.
More than a dozen other people in the mountainous region were killed by landslides, surging waters and a falling tree, the civil defence office in Manila added.
Apart from the unspecified number of missing Mankayan miners, four people were still unaccounted for elsewhere in the country, including a five-year-old girl.
Goni is the ninth out of an average of 20 storms that hit the Philippines each year.
The storm was on course directly to hit Kyushu island on Tuesday, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
It caused power outages to 21,400 households in the southern region on Monday morning, Okinawa Electric Power reported.
Thousands in Taiwan were evacuated from outlying islands and mountainous areas as a precaution, including 1500 from the hot spring region of Wulai just outside Taipei.
AFP
