Hundreds of thousands of survivors of a deadly Philippine typhoon crammed into shelters Friday, braving the stench of corpses as the government vowed action to prevent storm disasters. Typhoon Bopha whipped the south on Tuesday, leaving at least 546 people dead and hundreds more missing in the deadliest natural disaster this year in a country that is regularly hit with quakes, floods and volcanic eruptions.

President Benigno Aquino flew into the southern island of Mindanao which bore the brunt of the storm to meet with bruised and grieving survivors. "We want to find out why this tragedy happened and how to keep these tragedies from happening again," he told crowds after arriving by helicopter in the town of New Bataan which was mostly obliterated by the storm.

As he spoke, an excavator tore into the rubble of collapsed houses a short distance away, allowing rescue workers to pull out the bodies of two more victims. The parking lot was lined with decomposing corpses. Among the 213,400 left homeless by the storm was Violy Saging, 38, huddled in a basketball gym in New Bataan, one of only a few buildings left standing in the town which is a centre for the nation's banana and gold mining industries.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012