Eight Days of Disaster for Asia

No respite for disaster-hit Asia By Presi Mandari (AFP)

PADANG, Indonesia — Quake-trapped corpses rotted in Indonesia, the first storm deaths emerged from Laos and the Philippines cowered before a "super typhoon" as nature offered no respite Friday to disaster-hit Asia.

...In the Indonesian city of Padang, which was ravaged by a 7.6-magnitude quake Wednesday, ill-equipped emergency teams clawed through the rubble of collapsed buildings in an increasingly desperate search for survivors.

...Typhoon Parma, packing gusts of 230 kilometres (145 miles) an hour, was forecast to hit rural areas in the north of the Philippines' main island of Luzon on Saturday morning.

The government warned Parma would tear down houses in its direct path, while likely bringing more heavy rain and high winds to the nation's capital, Manila, and nearby areas still recovering from floods triggered by tropical storm Ketsana last weekend.

Ketsana killed nearly 300 people and affected more than three million as it pounded the region around Manila with the heaviest rains in four decades.

The storm wreaked havoc across much of Southeast Asia, with 99 deaths reported in Vietnam and 17 in Cambodia, while the Red Cross in Laos said Friday that at least 16 people had been killed and 135 were missing.

In the Pacific island of Samoa, emergency workers said they had given up hope of finding more survivors from a tsunami that slammed into the island on Tuesday.

Horrified aid workers found the bodies of at least five children in one Samoan village Thursday, including one who had been tossed into a tree by the force of the tsunami.

Officials said up to 150 may have been killed in Samoa, while the death toll stood at 31 in neighbouring American Samoa and nine in Tonga.

Samoa declared a national disaster after a giant 8.0 magnitude earthquake -- the worst in 90 years -- churned up waves between three and 7.5 metres high (10-25 feet) which pounded sleepy South Pacific villages and popular tourist resorts.