MANILA, Philippines — Eugene Pilo's wife and children are gone. So are almost all of his friends and neighbors.
In seconds, the mountain that loomed over his village took them in a rush of mud and boulders that smashed and covered everything in its path with 30 feet of earth. At least 23 people were killed, and 1,500 were missing and feared dead.
"What happened was horrendous," Pilo told GMA television Friday, hours after the landslide engulfed Guinsaugon village on Leyte island, 420 miles southeast of Manila.
"So many died. Our village is gone, everything was buried in mud. All the people are gone."
Pilo was at his brother's house when they felt the ground shake just before 10 a.m.
"Then the landslides struck," he recalled. "I ran out in the street, but I fell to the ground, along with my brother. There were big boulders — bigger than a house — and logs which rushed down."
The fate of loved ones was clear.
"We left the bodies there because it was dangerous to stay there," Pilo said.
Survivor Dario Libatan said he believed his wife and three children were killed.
"It sounded like the mountain exploded, and the whole thing crumbled," Libatan told Manila radio DZMM. "I could not see any house standing anymore."
TV footage of the scene showed that Guinsaugon was simply gone, with few signs the village of 2,500 people had ever existed. The landslide also swamped two nearby villages.
Rescue workers, dwarfed by a vast brown landscape that sharply contrasted with the bright green of nearby rice paddies, were seen desperately seeking signs of life beneath three stories of mud.
Sometimes they were lucky. They pulled a dazed child from the suffocating mud, then a woman. But as the day ended, only 53 survivors had been reported.
"We did not find injured people," said Ricky Estela, a crewman on a helicopter that flew a politician to the scene. "Most of them are dead and beneath the mud."