A palm tree came down on a bamboo house in Pitogo, Quezon province, in the early hours of Sunday, October 19. Five members of one family died under it, two of them children. A teenage boy was the only person in the house to live.
Disaster officials in the town said a rescue team spent hours getting the bodies out. Photos that officials put on social media showed the house flattened beneath the trunk. Pitogo lies about 153km (95 miles) southeast of Manila.
The deaths came as Tropical Storm Fengshen, called Ramil in the Philippines, crossed Luzon. At least five people are dead and two missing, according to Al Jazeera. Notably, the five dead are the Pitogo family, not victims of a landslide, which is where the trouble was in the south.
Landslide in Bukidnon
In Bukidnon province on Mindanao, a heavy downpour set off a large landslide. Two people riding a motorised three-wheeler went off the highway and have not been found. Public works officials said the road, which links Bukidnon with the Davao region, was shut to traffic.
Floods and evacuations
Flooding hit Luzon hard. AFP quoted officials in the southeast of the island who counted at least 47,000 residents moving into government shelters since Saturday. By Sunday, Pagasa, the national weather agency, said at least five dams on Luzon had opened their gates to let water out.
Aviation authorities ordered more than a dozen flights cancelled while the storm sat over Luzon on Sunday afternoon. Forecasters had it moving west toward the South China Sea.
Further south, officials reported heavy flooding on Samar and Panay, and residents had to leave their homes. One man was hurt in Estancia, on Panay, when his wooden house collapsed and pinned him, ABS-CBN reported. Footage shared online showed floodwater spreading through parts of Calbayog City, in Samar.
A hard few weeks
The storm arrived while the country was still recovering from a run of major earthquakes. Those quakes killed at least 87 people over the previous three weeks. The Philippines is struck by about 20 storms and typhoons in an average year, and scientists warn that climate change from human activity is making extreme weather stronger.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr wrote on Facebook on Sunday that the country is “very prone to having disasters and calamities”. He said it needs to “strengthen its disaster preparedness and response”.
Fengshen was the twenty-fourth named storm of the 2025 Pacific typhoon season. The Japan Meteorological Agency first tracked it as a tropical depression on October 12. Three days later it was downgraded to a low-pressure area and the agency stopped issuing advisories, though the Joint Typhoon Warning Center kept watching it. The storm later crossed the South China Sea and reached Central Vietnam as a tropical depression.
