Grim Search At Philippine Mudslide

Rescue workers dug grimly Tuesday for a mud-swamped elementary school, but in a different spot from where they excitedly detected underground sounds a day earlier that they hoped were signs of life.

The buzz that fed a sense of urgency Monday evening was gone. Ground-penetrating radar, capable of mapping structures up to 50 feet deep, found nothing.

Over a thousand people are feared dead in the now-buried village.

It is not clear if the scratching and tapping noises that were detected on Monday came from survivors or were only the sound of groundwater and mud settling.

"A few times we heard something, we think we heard something, because we really want to hear something," Farley said. "If there is anything at all, we're gonna go there."

Hopes of a miracle had focused on the school amid unconfirmed reports that survivors there sent cell phone text messages to relatives shortly after a mountainside collapsed Friday in a wall of mud and boulders that swamped the farming village of Guinsaugon.

But with the only survivors pulled out hours later, the prospects of finding life under mud believed to be as much as 100 feet deep are fading by the hour.

The last survivor was pulled out on Friday, only a few hours after a nearby mountain gave way.

The threat of more rain-triggered landslides has slowed the search, along with the question of where to dig and problems dealing with the wet mud.

CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen reports there are now claims that the mudslide may have been the result of illegal logging that stripped trees off the mountain - trees that can stabilize the soil when it gets soaked as this mountain was by some 30-inches of rain.

Excavations had centered Monday at a site where the school was believed to have sat, with some troops, miners and volunteers digging at a second site, about 200 yards away from the place to which some estimate the building might have been carried.

U.S. Marines, digging in shifts of 40 men, worked alongside Philippine troops and technical experts from Malaysia and Taiwan, but finally had to give up on the first site when the holes they created kept collapsing.

"As we'd dig deeper, we'd try to dig wider, but with the rain... there were little landslides happening around us," said Lt. Jack Farley, who was heading the Marine contingent. "The soil here is so unstable."

Accurate information is hard to come by, too.

"Even the local population has kind of lost their bearings," Farley said. "They don't have those terrain features around to distinguish where something really is."

Rescue teams used sensors in an effort to detect sounds and movements similar to those monitored on Monday.

Joel Son, head of a rescue team of Filipino miners, said the mud is so deep that searchers had yet to find the school where up to 300 children were in class when the disaster struck.

"Safety is an ongoing concern right now because of the rain," said U.S. Marine Capt. Burrell Parmer, one of hundreds of American servicemen involved in the recovery operation. "So far, no survivors have been recovered. It's a sad deal."

U.S. Marine Capt. Mark Paolicelli said Marines stayed at the school site up to 11 p.m., but left overnight because geologists warned them that heavy rains and danger of mudslides made the area unsafe.

Dozens of U.S. Marines and Philippine soldiers, along with local miners, dug into the muck with shovels and moved it with body bags, draining the murky water in large bottles.

Some officials have suggested leaving the village as a massive cemetery because digging out the bodies is too difficult and too dangerous.

Some bodies that were pulled out, but were not identified, were buried in mass graves earlier this week.

The dilemma of unidentified bodies is not likely to improve. There is almost no way to identify the few bodies that are being found - a task usually done by friends or relatives. With the whole village gone, there are often no friends or relatives still alive.

Search teams are moving carefully, unable to work as fast as they would like, for fear that their movements could set off more landslides.

The smell of rotting bodies wafted through the command post of the relief effort, about half a mile from the landslide site.

Under the glare of generator-powered lights, a multinational group of troops and technicians worked into the night Monday with shovels, rescue dogs and high-tech gear, including sound- and heat-detection equipment.

"We are just going try to find some life underground," said one dog handler, from Spain, as he traveled to the scene of the disaster. "The dogs can detect the breathing of the people alive and if there is someone underground, the dog say to us there is someone."

Volunteers are also on the scene from Malaysia, Taiwan and the U.S., including an evangelical minister affiliated with the Rev. Billy Graham. Gerry Brown, of U-Turn for Christ in Perris, Calif., has set up a counseling center to help the rescue workers get through their grim task.

"With every day gone by, chances of finding people alive are slim," he acknowledges, recalling his previous work helping rescue workers at Ground Zero in New York and in Thailand following the December 2004 tsunami.