A man pushes his cart fitted with empty water container to serve as a floater inAP – A man pushes his cart fitted with empty water container to serve as a floater in flood waters Saturday, …
By OLIVER TEVES, Associated Press Writer – Sat Oct 17, 2:34 am ET

MANILA, Philippines – The governor of a northern Philippine province said Saturday he has ordered residents to evacuate their already storm-ravaged areas ahead of a new typhoon after back-to-back storms in recent weeks killed more than 750 in the country.

Forecasters said Lupit — the Filipino word for cruel_ had intensified overnight into a typhoon with 81 mile per hour (130 kilometer per hour) winds and gusts of up to 100 mph (160 kph).

The Philippines is still recovering from Tropical Storm Ketsana in late September, which triggered the worst flooding in Manila in over 40 years, and the Oct. 3 landfall of Typhoon Parma, which lingered for a week while drenching the main island of Luzon. The two storms killed 773 people and affected more than 7 million.

The latest typhoon could spare the saturated northern Philippines and veer north toward Taiwan early next week, or it could track the same devastating path as Parma, chief government forecaster Nathaniel Cruz said. He said Lupit was slowing down over the sea east of Luzon, where it could further gain strength.

In northern Benguet province, where at least 288 were killed in Parma-triggered landslides, police officers were going house-to-house to tell people to leave the affected communities before the latest storm, Gov. Nestor Fongwan said.

"Definitely, they must go," Fongwan told The Associated Press. The communities are about 130 miles (210 kilometers) north of the capital, Manila.

Other Benguet communities identified as hazardous also were ordered evacuated, Fongwan said.

Disaster officers urged local officials to tell residents to immediately evacuate at the first sign of landslides, Cordillera regional civil defense chief Olive Luces said.

"Some people are just really stubborn and refuse to leave," she said, adding that survivors of Parma's landslides told of watching water seep from the walls and floors of homes before the ground collapsed around them.

Military choppers were airlifting food supplies to areas unreachable by land to prepare for Lupit, she said.

Health officials say 1.7 million people exposed to floodwaters in and around metropolitan Manila were being threatened by leptospirosis, a disease spread by water contaminated with urine of infected animals. The disease has killed 90 of 1,027 reported cases, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said.

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