With two dozen rescued, hope of finding more survivors fades

Victims are being buried in mass graves.
GUINSAUGON, Philippines (AP) -- Marine Capt. Jeff O'Donnell lost his home in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina, but he was still shaken by the devastation left by a river of mud that smashed over this once bustling farming village.
"This is my first time to see anything like this," O'Donnell said Sunday after arriving with the first group of U.S. Marines sent to aid Filipino teams digging through muck up to 30 feet as hope for finding survivors rapidly faded.
Only about two dozen battered, dazed people have been rescued from the debris left by Friday's disaster, which left some 1,800 people missing and presumed dead.
A woman who escaped the destruction said the first inkling of the calamity was a mild shaking of the ground, followed by a loud boom and a roar that sounded like many airplanes.
"I looked up to the mountain and I saw the ground and boulders rushing down," said Alicia Miravalles.
She said she ran across her family's rice field ahead of the wall of mud and boulders. "I thought I was dead. If the landslide did not stop, I would really be dead now."
Florencio Libaton, an injured villager, told of being caught by the soupy mush while trying to flee with his wife. He said he was rolled and tossed among boulders and tree trunks that were swept down the adjacent mountainside.
"I said, 'God, is this how we are going to die?"' Libaton recalled at Anahawan District Hospital, where he and 20 other injured were taken.
Buried in mass graves
Weary search teams found more than a dozen bodies Sunday, raising the number of confirmed deaths to 72. With no one left to claim the dead and bodies quickly starting to decompose in the tropical heat, officials ordered them buried in mass graves.
At a cemetery five miles from Guinsaugon, a Roman Catholic priest sprinkled holy water on 30 bodies, some wrapped in bags, others in cheap wooden coffins, then said a prayer through a mask worn to filter out the stench.
Volunteers lowered the bodies to men who placed them side by side at the bottom of the grave.
The only witnesses were local health officials, the provincial governor, some of her staff and a few nearby residents. Some evacuees from the landslide watched from the window of a nearby Catholic school.
Twenty more bodies were to be buried there today.
In the capital, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said Sunday that "all the efforts of our government continue and will not stop while there is hope to find survivors." But those hopes faded each hour as no more survivors were found for a second straight day.
U.S. troops arrive
Two shiploads of U.S. Marines arrived off Leyte island Sunday to help, diverted from military exercises elsewhere in the Philippines. A unit of 32 started digging at the school, and a total of 200 Marines had come ashore by sunset. Hundreds more were expected today.
Communist rebels active elsewhere on Leyte warned the U.S. troops not to stray into insurgent zones, but said they would not attack unless provoked. The New People's Army rebels have been waging a rebellion since the late 1960s.
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