'End of the world' moonscape in a sea of grey mud

ROMMEL DANAO stands on the spot where his house used to be. 'At least, I think this is the spot judging by the roof of the double-storey house with the sari sari store just over there,' he said.

The pleasant suburb of Barangay Cabangbangan near Bacolor that was home to Mr Danao's three-bedroom house is now a vast grey desert, interspersed with church steeples, roofs, shredded trees and the tops of telegraph poles.

The historic San Guillermo parish church, Don Honorio Ventura College of Arts and Trade and the St Mary's Academy, which were all built during the Spanish occupation, are half sunk like a flotilla of foundering battleships in a sea of grey.

'The markets, schools and about 500 houses were buried in about two metres of lahar [volcanic mud],' Mr Danao said.

'It reminds me of an end-of-the-world scene in Mad Max. Everything you see around here is either buried, broken down, falling down or lopsided.

'I don't think I can ever recover my house from the lahar and I don't think we can ever bring this barangay [government district] back to life again the way it was. Some of us will have to move away and begin again somewhere else.' Some lahar-affected areas in Pampanga, Zambales and Tarlac provinces are covered by floodwaters, while other areas have been twisted into moonscape canyons and crevasses by mudslides that cascaded down Mount Pinatubo at the height of Typhoon Sibyl last month.

Many of the houses near Bacolor are buried so deep they cannot be reached. Evacuees have built rickety shelters on top of their houses, and some are trying to tunnel down to their dwellings to recover valuable possessions, or to assess whether they can be reinhabited.