Search operations have ended in Baguio City in the northern Philippines, with the final death toll from Sunday’s landslide at ten. Five of those killed were children. The youngest was two years old, buried with her mother.

Across the wider Cordillera region, at least 14 people have died in landslides over the same period. Three people were pulled alive from the debris in Baguio.

What happened

The slope above Barangay Guisad Surong gave way at around 9:40pm on Sunday evening, burying three houses. Thirteen people were inside them.

Roughly 150 rescuers worked the site for two days. The city’s mayor described the operation as extremely difficult: a steep hillside, soil so loose that further collapse was a constant risk, and a concrete slab that had to be moved before anyone underneath could be reached.

Two of the last victims recovered were a 64-year-old man and, found several metres away about two hours later, his eight-year-old granddaughter.

Why landslides kill at night

The timing is not incidental. Landslides disproportionately kill people who were asleep at home.

A slope fails suddenly, often with very little warning that would be recognisable to someone inside a house. There is no equivalent of a flood rising visibly or a fire producing smoke. The first indication is frequently the collapse itself, and the material arrives in seconds.

Once a house is buried, survival depends on whether an air pocket happens to form, and on how quickly rescuers can dig through material that is heavy, unstable and liable to move again.

Why the Cordillera

Baguio sits high in the mountains of northern Luzon, and its geography combines several risk factors at once.

The terrain is steep. The soils are deep, weathered and prone to saturation. The region receives some of the heaviest rainfall in the country, and this month it has been hit by two tropical cyclones alongside an intensified southwest monsoon — the weather system Filipinos call the habagat.

Rain does not simply run off a slope. It soaks in, adding weight to the soil while reducing the friction holding it in place. That is why landslides frequently occur after days of rain rather than during the heaviest downpour, and why a slope that has held through previous storms can fail without any obvious change in conditions.

The part that is not natural

Calling these events natural disasters is only partly accurate, and the inaccurate part matters.

Baguio was built for a population a fraction of its current size, and it has grown enormously. Where flat land runs out, housing goes up the slopes — often built incrementally, by residents, without engineering assessment of whether the ground beneath can carry it.

Construction on a hillside changes how water moves through it. Cutting into a slope to make a level building platform removes support from the material above. Drainage that discharges onto a slope rather than away from it concentrates water exactly where it does most damage. Vegetation removal takes away roots that were binding the soil.

None of that is a criticism of the people who live there. Housing on marginal land is what happens when cities grow faster than affordable, safe housing is built — and the households on the least stable ground are almost always those with the fewest alternatives.

What warnings can and cannot do

Authorities had evacuated residents in parts of the area, and 13 further landslides were being monitored across the city.

Landslide forecasting is genuinely hard. Rainfall can be measured and thresholds set, but predicting which specific slope will fail, and when, remains beyond current capability. A city can know it is at elevated risk across hundreds of sites without being able to say which house will be hit.

Evacuation also asks a great deal of people. Leaving means abandoning a home and possessions, often repeatedly, for a danger that usually does not materialise. Families who have evacuated several times without incident understandably become reluctant — and the one time they stay is the time that matters.

The wider damage

Beyond the deaths, the regional disaster council has estimated around 950 million pesos of damage to roads and bridges. Fifteen road sections have been left impassable and communities isolated, with areas losing electricity and classes suspended across several municipalities.

Isolation compounds everything else. Blocked roads slow rescue, delay medical evacuation and cut off supplies — and in mountainous terrain a single failed section can leave a community unreachable for days.

Five children

The Philippine education department has publicly mourned the deaths of five schoolchildren among the ten.

Rescuers also found a dog alive under the debris, still shaking, unable to eat or drink. It gave them hope that other survivors might be beneath the rubble. There were none.

That detail is in almost every local report, and it is worth keeping. It is what the end of a search actually looks like: a small piece of good news, and then nothing more.

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Sources: GMA News; Rappler; Philippine News Agency; Philippine Daily Inquirer; Manila Times, 10–11 August 2026.