Army rescuers listed 306 dead and 152 missing from this hapless town on the east coast of Luzon, which was flattened by floods and an avalanche of mud, logs and boulders from the Sierra Madre mountain range on Monday.

A total of 131 corpses have been found in the nearby town of General Nakar with about 100 residents still missing, while the town of Infanta yielded 47 dead with about 100 also missing, according to an army tally here.

The tally excludes 48 people who died and 38 listed as missing elsewhere on Luzon, home to nearly half the archipelago's population of 84 million.

Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit urged the hard-hit communities quickly to bury rotting corpses recovered from under the mud and floating on the coast and along swollen rivers, to prevent epidemics.

"As much as possible, the bodies should be buried as soon as possible," he said.

Lime has been sent to flood-hit communities to try to preserve some of the dead so they may be identified before burial but there may not be enough preservative to go around, he said.

Luzon braced for the fury of Typhoon Nanmadol on Thursday as the cyclone killed about eight people, tore down power lines and at least one bridge and hampered rescuers trying to reach victims of Monday's storm.

The government suspended ferry services and grounded propeller-driven aircraft across Luzon, stranding several thousand passengers as Nanmadol pummelled the eastern island of Catanduanes in mid-morning with peak winds of up to 220 kilometres (137 miles) an hour.