GUINSAUGON, Philippines – Workers began burying victims of a huge mudslide in a mass grave Sunday as hopes of finding more survivors all but evaporated.

Exhausted rescue teams dug through unstable mud at a buried elementary school and village hall where hundreds were trapped inside when a river of mud swept over the farming village of Guinsaugon, killing nearly all its 1,857 people.

With bodies decomposing quickly in the tropical heat, officials ordered the burial of 30 unidentified bodies Sunday at a cemetery about five miles from the wrecked village. Twenty more bodies were to be buried there Monday.

Under a light drizzle, a Roman Catholic priest sprinkled holy water on the bodies, some wrapped in bags, others in cheap wooden coffins, then said a prayer. Volunteers lowered the bodies to men who placed them side by side at the bottom of the grave.

The only witnesses were local health department officials, the provincial governor, some of her staff and a few other people. Some of the few survivors watched from the window of a nearby Catholic school.

No one had been found alive since Friday, when a mountainside collapsed on Guinsaugon after weeks of torrential rain on slopes that villagers said were unstable after heavy illegal logging.

Officials had said 57 survivors were pulled from the mud Friday, but on Sunday lowered the number to 20 without explanation. At least 72 bodies had been recovered, including 14 on Sunday.

One resident who escaped the slide said the disaster began with a mild shaking in the ground, then a loud boom followed by a road that sounded like many airplanes.

“I looked up to the mountain and I saw the ground and boulders rushing down,” Alicia Miravalles said.

She said she ran across her family’s rice field trying to outrun the wall of mud and boulders. “I thought I was dead. If the landslide did not stop, I would really be dead now.”

The family’s nearly 4-acre rice farm is now a mound of rocks and mud.

“Our farm is gone. We have no more home,” her husband, Mario, said. “We can only rely now on the government’s help.”

Volunteers with two rescue dogs digging around the entombed elementary school found no signs that any of the 250 to 300 children and at least six teachers inside were alive. Mud was 30 feet deep in some places.

A group of 32 U.S. Marines joined in the digging at the school after two ships arrived with 1,000 Marines diverted from planned joint exercises with the Philippine military. About 200 Marines were on the ground by nightfall and hundreds more were expected to come ashore Monday.