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MANILA - Tropical storm Halong on Sunday battered the northern Philippines with winds of 95 kilometres per hour, triggering floods and landslides and displacing about 6,000 people, relief officials said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties but the civil defence office in Manila said huge waves known as storm surges destroyed 10 houses and displaced 780 people in and around the coastal town of Botolan, about 145 kilometres northwest of the capital.
Large areas of the northwestern coast of the main Philippine island of Luzon were without electricity while the coastguard barred small ferries from taking to sea, it said in a report.
More than 5,000 other people were displaced by flooding and landslides in the central island of Panay when the storm brushed past the region last week, the relief agency said in a statement.
Floods cut off key roads in Panay, the neighbouring island of Mindoro and northern Luzon while a number of mountain roads in the northern Cordillera region were temporarily shut for preventive maintenance, it added.
The eye of the storm was tracked about 80 kilometres northeast of the northern mountain resort of Baguio at 4:00am (2000 GMT Saturday), the weather bureau here said.
It was moving northeast and was expected to cut across the sparsely populated Cordillera range before blowing out into the sea off Luzon's northeast coast early Monday, it added.
The bureau warned residents of low-lying areas and near mountain slopes across Luzon to "take all the necessary precautions against possible flash floods and landslides," saying the storm was enhancing the rain-laden seasonal winds of the southwest monsoons.
Luzon's west coast and the islands on the western half of the central Philippines could be hit by big waves, it added. - AFP/ir
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