MANILA — At least one person died and 38 others went missing after a mountain of rubbish collapsed at a landfill in the central Philippines on Thursday, athorities said.

Police, firefighters and disaster-mitigation personnel retrieved eight people who were trapped on Thursday afternoon in the avalanche of garbage and debris in the village of Binaliw in Cebu city, police said on Friday.

One of those rescued, a 22-year-old female worker at the landfill, died while being brought to a hospital, regional police director Brig. Gen. Roderick Maranan told The Associated Press.

Many of the victims are believed to be sanitation workers at the landfill. The cause of the collapse is still unclear.

Some 300 people from various government agencies and civilian groups have been deployed to the privately-owned landfill. Several excavators, ambulances and fire trucks are also seen on site.

"All response teams remain fully engaged in search and retrieval efforts to locate the remaining missing persons," Cebu Mayor Nestor Archival said in a Facebook post on Friday.

Cebu City councillor Joel Garganera said the incident may have happened suddenly, but was likely a result of poor waste management practices.

Operators had been cutting into the mountain, mining the soil, and then piling garbage to form another mountain of waste, Garganera told local newspaper The Freeman.

"It's not a sanitary landfill. It's already an open dumpsite," he said.

Landfills are common in major Philippine cities like Cebu, which is the trading centre and transportation gateway of the Visayas, the archipelago nation's central islands. — Agencies