Philippine miners dig for their own in typhoon landslide

The miners in the mountains of the northern Philippines usually dig for gold. But on Tuesday they were digging for their colleagues and relatives buried under a vast landslide unleashed by Typhoon Mangkhut.

Searchers have already pulled over a dozen corpses from the mud and debris in the mining town of Itogon, and up to 40 more people could be entombed -- with very little hope they are alive.

"I know all of them. I work with them," said miner Johnny Paggadut Jr. "The only thing on my mind now is I want to help give the bodies of my friends back to their families." Around him hundreds of searchers, a quarter of whom were miners, scraped away at the hardening mass of mud as cadaver-sniffing dogs were led across the site.

A roughly half-kilometre (third of a mile) stretch of hillside in the Cordillera range collapsed on dwellings used by small-scale miners and their families as the typhoon dumped a month's worth of rain in a matter of hours.

Even before the storm hit, the hilly region was primed for landslides after a month of monsoon rains saturated the soil.

Carlos Payadon, 62, was working the hot, muddy pit on Tuesday in search of his nephew Sidney Dumugdog.

He had hoped the young man, in his 20s, would find a different job with fewer risks, but Dumugdog needed the money.

"I know he is already dead. But I just hope we can dig up his body," Payadon said. "I can't give up. When you give up it's like forsaking your family."