Guinsaugon, Philippines – The U.S. Marines dug and dug, 10 feet down, then 20. But just as they tried to use their shovels to widen the little hole, the mud began collapsing all around them.
It was another maddening end to a foray in hope in a place where hope is increasingly hard to find.
This has been a disaster to challenge the most resourceful rescue worker – no survivors found since the first few hours after a mountainside collapsed on the village of Guinsaugon, deep wet mud that threatens to claim new victims and a vastly changed landscape.
By Tuesday – four days after the landslide – about 250 people toiled in the stretch of mud, rocks and debris that is the village’s new face, working in hazy tropical heat and cooler downpours.
They looked like ants as they negotiated the 100-acre morass – weary ants who increasingly took a businesslike approach as optimism faded of finding anyone alive in an elementary school buried up to 100 feet deep.
The 45-minute hike from the edge of the mudfield to the suspected site of the school has become a well-beaten system of trails – used by people hauling in fuel, food, water, equipment and lights, and by exhausted and muddied rescue workers trudging out.
It still was possible, though, to slip waist-deep into a patch of soft muck, or to pick up a nasty cut from the jagged edges of boulders that shattered during the plunge down the mountain. Miners used shovels, picks and long steel rods to break up the rocks so they could be carried away.
The biggest risk was ever present – that the mountain might not be done shedding earth, boulders and trees.
Designated “watchers” constantly kept an eye on the slope, ready to give a shrill, three-whistle warning for everyone to run.
A main frustration was that no one was sure where to dig.
“Even the local population has kind of lost their bearings,” said Lt. Jack Farley, who was leading about 40 Marines at the site. “They don’t have those terrain features around to distinguish where something really is.”
Still, Farley and the other Marines said they would keep digging until all hope was gone.
