Failed Forecast Facilitated Fengshen Flooding Fotos?

Are these Fengshen Flooding Fotos what a Failed Forecast Facilitated? Perhaps, though in even the best of countries with the best preparation, you will still see scenes like this. The death toll does seem unusually large to me, but that's just a feeling, nothing I can point to statistically.

I'd like to hear the Media look into this further, but the country seems distant and uninteresting to those in the U.S. media. The ferry capsizing (as mentioned below) concerns me because that sounds like something that could have been avoided with better planning, and may add hundreds of deaths to the current toll (put at 155 by the Associated Press, who provided the photos below through the AccuWeather.com AP Photo Archive).

The AP says in the article above: "Packing sustained winds of 74 miles per hour and gusts of up to 93 mph, the typhoon shifted course Sunday to the northwest and battered Manila at dawn, dumping heavy rain on the capital." What they are referring to here is the northward turn that forecasters had anticipated since early this week, and what is shown by the black track symbols below from the JTWC map from last night.

International Tropical Expert Meteorologist Jim Andrews (PREMIUM | PRO) gives stats on the storm's rainfall today in his blog:

NASA's TRMM Satellite showed 24-hour rainfall amounts nearly off the chart in Google Earth.