Death Dump To Close

Philippine President Joseph Estrada visited the ruins of a Manila shantytown on Thursday where more than 200 people were killed by an avalanche of garbage and promised new homes for the survivors.

Estrada also announced a donation of $225 for each family that suffered losses in the July 10 disaster and said the dump would close.

Local officials said earlier they were screening people because they had discovered some were falsely claiming bodies to get compensation.

The shantytown, called Promised Land and built below a towering garbage dump, was buried under tons of rubbish when the dump collapsed after being battered by heavy rains.

A total of 210 bodies—84 of them still unidentified—have been recovered. Officials said an unknown number were still buried under the rubbish.

Estrada, speaking to the slum-dwellers, said he decided to adopt a 9-year-old girl orphaned in the disaster. "Because she is all alone now, I will adopt her," the Manila Times quoted the president as saying.

But the girl, asked by reporters if she would accept the offer, shook her head, indicating "no" and said "I don't know."

The girl's grandmother said they could not accept the president's offer because she and her granddaughter did not want to be separated.

According to the Times, nearly 3,000 former residents of the Shantytown remained at an emergency shelter.

The July 11 disaster was Biblical in scope: a seven-story mound of trash, unsettled by torrential, typhoon rains, collapsed and buried the shantytown, then burst into flame, likely ignited by fallen wires.

Bodies trapped underneath the massive trash pile, which covered four basketball courts, soon began to decompose and the smell of death was stronger than the stink of the garbage, some workers said.

Manila has faced a growing garbage crisis for years as surrounding towns refuse to allow construction of new dumps.

Many of the poorest residents of Manila make a living searching the dumps to find items they can re-sell. They also build makeshift homes there to be closer to their scavenging sites

The Payatas dump, along with a former dump in Manila's Tondo slum district called Smokey Mountain, have long symbolized the wrenching poverty in the Philippines, where an estimated 32 percent of residents live below the poverty level.

The Payatas dump site was to be closed permanently last December, but the plan was postponed until later this year because residents near a landfill in nearby Rizal province refused to allow waste from metropolitan Manila to be dumped there.