Supertyphoon Durian Leaves 596 Dead, Missing in Philippines (Ian C. Sayson)

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  By Ian C. Sayson

  Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- At least 596 people have been killed or are missing after Supertyphoon Durian smashed into the Philippines, causing flooding and the most rainfall in four decades, government officials said.

  Durian brought 249 kilometers an hour (155 miles an hour) winds and heavy rain that caused floods and mudslides in southeast Luzon, the nation's main island. It's the ninth tropical storm and typhoon to make landfall this year in the Philippines. The rainfall reached 466 millimeters, the country's largest since 1967, and exceeded the monthly amount in Albay, one of the provinces hardest hit, a government official said.

  ``The storm poured in one day an amount of rain that's greatly more than what that area gets in a month,'' Renato Solidum, director at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said today in a telephone interview. ``When you have such a big volume of rain, you'd see a lot of floods and landslides.''

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