Nicamor Gacura squashed one more piece of rotting cardboard into a wooden crate already full with similar ripped-up boxes and tied it up with a piece of plastic cord he pulled off a badly punctured bright yellow rubber dinghy.

"This feels like it is at least 60 kilos," he said, lifting it up. "That means another 60 pesos [70p] for us."

The "us" is his team of seven other ragclad scavengers who have earned the right to trawl one tiny area of the enormous Payatas rubbish dump, a stench of an eyesore on the north-eastern edge of Manila that takes more than a third of the Philippine capital's daily waste.

Home to 20,000 scavengers and supporting a community five times that number, Payatas - known perversely as the Promised Land - has become a national symbol of the nation's massive poverty crisis. And it is a problem that is growing at a rate of several thousand tonnes of waste a day.

Mr Gacura's motley crew consists of two other men, one woman and four boys, the youngest of whom, known as Knock-Knock, is only seven years old. Their allotted patch is about three-quarters of the way up one side of the 70ft-high mountain of refuse that covers an area larger than three football fields.

"If we go far outside our area we are likely to get mugged," said team member Rico (14), who reckons he has had a total of about two terms of formal schooling. "There is a strict hierarchy here and everyone has to respect it."

In an average 10-hour day they will fill about six crates of cardboard, several sacks of plastic mineral water bottles and aluminium cans that sell for 32 cents each, and anything else they can get their hands on.

"From time to time we might find some money and very occasionally we come across some jewellery," Mr Gacura said. "But our most common luxury item is copper wire." This goes for 40 pesos a kilo with the plastic coating removed or half that with it still on. The plastic is removed by burning it off, a process that creates a haze of toxic smoke.

The team's daily takings, which usually come to about 1,000 pesos, are divided proportionally, depending on who has done the most work.

Knock-Knock did not make much money yesterday:; he was more interested in playing with a small Power Ranger-type doll that he had had found coated in rotting vegetables. He did not care at all that the figure had lost one arm and half a leg, and was missing its helmet.

This week has been anything but normal, however. At 7 a.m. on Monday morning, the team, bleary-eyed after a relatively unproductive night shift, was just about to head home when disaster struck. "We heard a noise like a low-flying aeroplane and then realised that the dump was moving," Mr Gacura said.

Within seconds it was obvious that a massive landslide of rubbish was beginning. "There was nothing we could do except watch in fear as this huge section of the dump collapsed on to our homes," he said. "If we had not been working the night shift, we would have been killed. The family in the next-door house, who were just about to start work, were all killed."

People who were awake fled with whatever valuables they could carry. Norma de Lara (22) has moved into a 5 feet by 4 feet hut in Mr Gacura's team's patch with the four teenage children of her husband's first marriage. They have no spare clothes, bedding, plates, pots or pans; but they do have a second-hand TV, a battered stereo and a Mickey Mouse clock stuck at 10.30.

"When I'm no longer in such shock, I'm going to sell the stereo," said Ms de Lara, who is five months pregnant. "I hope I will be able to hang on to the TV."

NO ONE knows how many people died in the tragedy. The official death toll has risen to 150, with 173 still listed as missing, but most witnesses say this is just a fraction of the number that perished, as many of the scavengers were not registered with the authorities.

"I reckon more than 1,000 people must have been killed," said Henry Pugao, whose house used to be 60 feet from the rubbish but is now right next to it. "The houses were so tightly packed together and they were full of children because there was no school that day because of a one-day general strike."

It is easy to believe his estimate. Despite working round the clock, the rescuers' halfdozen excavators have barely reached the remains of the flimsy shanties made out of little more than wooden planks and corrugated iron, let alone the bodies that are buried inside them.

"We are not expecting to find any more survivors," said Col Jaime Canatoy, in charge of the 300 soldiers leading the rescue efforts. "There is so much methane gas in this garbage that anyone under there must be dead by now. But there are always miracles."

The methane is a very serious health hazard. Out of nowhere a plume of it will suddenly emerge from the dump and make its way skywards. "Inhaling it won't kill you but it is not pleasant," Mr Gacura said.

While the gas is not an instant killer, it is one of the factors that has reduced the scavengers' life expectancy from 54 to 48. Respiratory problems, diarrhoea, skin infections, TB, malnutrition, cholera and typhoid are all part of everyday life, although Mr Gacura, who has lived on the dump for six years, says he now barely notices that he is permanently ill.

"It's like the smell," he said. "When we first arrived it was a real problem. But now we are used to it. We just have to get on with life as best we can." Despite being sick all the time, Mr Gacura does not regret leaving his job as a construction labourer and moving to the dump.

"Here I have no boss, I can work when I want and I am guaranteed cash in my hand every day. Back then I was only paid once a week and it was much harder to manage the money."

He and his team are among the lowest of the low at Payatas. Whenever another truck full of rubbish arrives on the dump they look enviously at the people rummaging around in the back. "That's the next step up," he says. "Those guys get first pick of the rubbish, so they usually get the best stuff. We have to take what they don't want."

Even further up the food chain are people such as Edita de la Questa, who run the dump's junk shops, a euphemism for the wholesalers who process what people such as like Mr Gacura and his team collect. "I used to be a scavenger," she said, "but then in 1994 I heard a knock on my door. It was a priest asking me if I wanted to join a credit scheme run by the Catholic Church."

Her first loan, of 4,000 pesos, took two years to repay. Since then she has gone on to selling the rubbish at an 80 per cent markup to recycling factories and has just taken out a loan for 250,000 pesos.

Not only is Ms de la Questa a member of the credit union, she has also joined the Payatas Waste Pickers' Development Project. This group makes handicrafts and other products out of the rubbish. They have been so successful that they were asked to showcase their goods at Expo 2000, currently taking place in Hanover, Germany. Unfortunately the project could not raise the funds to send anyone there.

Like everyone else making a livelihood out of the rubbish, Ms de la Questa is terrified about the consequences of the landslide. "The mayor has said that the dump will close next Monday while the council assesses whether it should be allowed to stay open. That could take till the end of the year and I only have enough trash to survive for five months."

The authorities are currently proposing a site five miles away, too far for most of the scavengers to trek to each day. "Let's just wait and see," Mr Gacura said. "Nothing is certain yet. We all hope Payatas will stay open. Without it we have nothing, no money and so no life."