Officials said it would be a challenge to determine the number of dead given the masses displaced [AFP]

Disaster officials said the death toll on Sunday stood at 73 while tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes.

But as floodwaters began to recede in and around Manila, hundreds still remained on rooftops, waving and shouting for food, water and warm clothes.

'State of calamity'

"Right now the challenge is to find out how many people have actually died and how many people we have to take care of in terms of people who've been displaced,"  Richard Gordon, the chairman of the Philippines National Red Cross, said.

"We're really talking about maybe hundreds of thousands of people," with about 280,000 to 300,000 displaced in the main island of Luzon alone, he said.

The government has declared a "state of calamity" in Manila and 25 storm-hit provinces, allowing officials to utilise emergency funds for relief and rescue, Gilbert Teodoro, the defence secretary has said.

About 300,000 people were displaced in the main island of Luzon alone [AFP]

Troops, police and civilian volunteers have rescued more than four thousand people, officials said.

Tropical Storm Ketsana roared across the northern Philippines near Manila on Saturday, unleashing more than a month's worth of rain in just 12 hours.

Ketsana swamped entire towns, set off landslides and shut down Manila's airport for several hours.

Aerial pictures showed the severity of the flooding with buses nearly completely submerged under water and people climbing on top of their vehicles to seek shelter from the flooded streets.

Death and destruction

Emergency workers could be seen carrying bodies on makeshift stretchers in Marikina in eastern Manila. One rescuer was seen lifting the small body of a child covered in mud.

Distress calls and emails from thousands of residents in metropolitan Manila and their worried relatives flooded TV and radio stations overnight.

The sun shone briefly in Manila on Sunday and showed the extent of devastation in many neighbourhoods - destroyed houses, overturned vans and cars, and streets and highways covered in debris and mud.

The 42.4 centimetres of rain that swamped metropolitan Manila in just 12 hours on Saturday exceeded the 39.2-centimetre average for September, weather bureau Director Nathaniel Cruz said, adding that the rainfall broke the previous record of 33.4 centimetres in a 24-hour period in June 1967.

Rubbish-choked drains and waterways, along with high tide, compounded the problem, officials said.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the Philippines president, had to take an elevated commuter train to the disaster council office to preside over a meeting on Saturday because roads were clogged by vehicles stuck in the floodwaters.

Ketsana, which packed winds of 85 kilometres per hour (kph) with gusts of up to 100 kph, hit land early on Saturday. It then roared across the main northern Luzon island towards the South China Sea.

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