Two days after the horror storm sent torrents of water through the nation's capital Manila and surrounding provinces, the government conceded it was unable to deal with the disaster on its own and needed urgent help.

"We are appealing for international humanitarian assistance," Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said in a nationally televised briefing.

"The potential for a more serious situation is there and we cannot wait for that to happen."

Teodoro launched the appeal as he announced the death toll had climbed sharply to 140 people, with another 32 missing and 453,000 forced out of their flooded or destroyed homes.

The death toll is expected to jump even further, as local authorities reported dozens of other deaths that appear not to have been included in the government's figures.

President Gloria Arroyo described the deluge, which was the worst to hit Manila in more than four decades and left 80 percent of the city under water, as a "once-in-a-lifetime" storm.

"(It) was an extreme event that has strained our response capabilities to the limit. But it is not breaking us," she said.

But with the threat of disease lurking over the disaster zones and relief workers in dire shortage of supplies to help survivors, other officials said authorities were not coping.

"The system is overwhelmed, local government units are overwhelmed," the head of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, Anthony Golez, told reporters.

Authorities said some people remained stranded in their flooded homes more than 48 hours after the floods, while power and telephone services were still cut in the worst-hit areas of Manila.

Poor drainage systems meant some places remained waist-deep in water, while vast swathes of the sprawling city of 12 million people were covered in sludge.

In schools, open-air gymnasiums and other makeshift evacuation camps, tens of thousands of people were desperately short of food, water and clothes.

At one gymnasium in eastern Manila, 3,000 people were sheltering in hot and humid conditions alongside the bodies of 11 neighbours lying in coffins.

There was no running water, and human faeces lay only a metre (yards) from where people were sleeping on the concrete floor.

"We are waiting for more aid to arrive. We are trying to mobilise our own relief operations here. But we need more help," the head of the local neighbourhood, Armando Endaya, told AFP.

Edgar Halog, a 44-year-old driver of one of Manila's iconic "jeepney" buses, was sheltering with his wife and seven children.

"We do not have any money, we do not know what to do. We don't have any other relatives. We are waiting for food rations," Halog told AFP.

In a wealthier part of Manila that was also swamped by the floods, residents raced against looters to retrieve televisions and other valuables, with hardly any sign of a police presence.

"We hope to recover something from our home, if there is anything left to recover," said resident Jun de Guzman, 48, as he and three relatives carrying brooms waded in the knee-deep muck covering what was left of Provident Village.

Health authorities also warned of disease outbreaks and appealed to the public for donations of medicine, clean water and food, as well as for medics to volunteer their services.

Infections including swine flu, diarrhoea and the bacterial disease leptospirosis were at the top of the government's list of concerns, Melissa Guerrero, chief aide to the health secretary, told AFP.

Defence Minister Teodoro said that apart from relief goods, funding and medicine, the Philippines may also ask for international rescue teams.

A small number of US forces, stationed in the Philippines to train local forces in combating terrorists, have helped in rescue efforts over the past two days.

After ripping across the Philippines, tropical storm Ketsana was upgraded to a full typhoon and was bearing down on central Vietnam, where officials expected it to make landfall late Tuesday.

earlier related report
Philippines government faces angry backlash over floods
The Philippine government faced an angry backlash Monday over flooding that claimed at least 140 lives, with residents voicing frustration at the pace of rescue efforts.

With some people still stranded on the upper floors of their homes more than 48 hours after the flooding began, the government admitted it was not prepared for the disaster but insisted it was not to blame.

Defending the government's actions, officials repeated President Gloria Arroyo's statement that more rain fell on Manila and surrounding areas in Saturday's deluge than on New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit there in 2005.

However, for many the disaster revealed the divisions that separate the city's rich and poor, and problems with planning and development in the city.

"Why is it that rich villages get help first?" said Bobby Santillosa, head of a neighbourhood-based disaster-response team in Bagong Silangan, a low-income northern Manila neighbourhood.

The community leader saw 29 neighbours drown in the flooding sparked by tropical storm Ketsana, when more than a month of rain fell in less than nine hours.

"They were already dead when rescuers arrived," he added.

A woman who refused to give her name told AFP that the government response was too little too late, as police rescued her elderly parents from a rooftop in a poor neighbourhood near the bank of the Pasig River.

"Help was too slow coming. We've been up here since Saturday and we had not eaten anything since then," she said.

Parts of the city of 12 million people were under up to 20 feet (six metres) of water, leaving at least 140 people dead and forcing nearly half a million from their homes across Manila and surrounding provinces.

Bayani Fernando, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority chief who is responsible for flood control in the capital, said that among the major factors in the flood were poor city planning, illegal structures and simple geography.

"Our problem is we live where we should never have lived," he said.

Manila, which like most of the country lies on the Pacific typhoon belt, is bisected by the Pasig and Marikina rivers whose waters connect Manila Bay to the west with a huge lake, Laguna de Bay, to the east.

Some areas of the city lie below sea level, sit on silt and rely on pumps to keep the water out, while the eastern district of Marikina, ground zero of the disaster, is a valley surrounded by the Sierra Madre mountain range.

He said obstructions, either caused by squatters putting up illegal structures or rich landowners encroaching on land such as riverbanks that allow natural drainage, should be removed.

"If we want to stop this, we have to remove all the things that are obstructing the waters," Fernando said.

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