Death Toll Rises as Typhoons Pummel Asia
Associated Press
Published: August 10, 2009
BEIJING — Deaths and damage from two typhoons rose on Monday, with nine reported dead in Japan and a rural village in south-central Taiwan buried in a mudslide. The number of dead there was not known. Thirty-seven people had already been reported dead in the Philippines, Taiwan, and China.
The Hotel Chin Shuai lay collapsed in floodwater during typhoon Morakot in Chihpen, southeastern Taiwan, on Sunday.
Initial reports from the Taiwanese village, Hsiao-lin, were sketchy. A spokesman for the National Fire Administration, Liang Yuchu, said that 45 people had been pulled alive from the mudslide, but that no dead had been found.
Other unverified reports from local residents, quoted by news services, suggested that as many as 600 people were missing. Hundreds of people are scattered in houses outside the more concentrated boundaries of the village, and the scope of the landslide was not known.
“The whole village was buried in the landslide, so it’s hard to be certain,” Mr. Liang said. “They’re still searching.”
The storm, Morakot, unleashed record rains that dropped up to 83 inches in some parts of Taiwan on Friday and Saturday, causing what officials say is the worst flooding in half a century. The number of known dead in Taiwan is 15, with 32 were severely injured. Those figures do not include potential landslide victims.
Morakot, which means emerald in Thai, struck the Philippines last week, killing 21 people, including a French tourist and two Belgian tourists, according to officials there. Seven others were reported missing.
One person also was killed on mainland China, where Morakot struck Sunday.
In Japan on Monday, at least nine people were killed, and nine others were missing after another typhoon, Etau, slammed the western part of the country, bringing heavy rain that led to floods and landslides, The A.P. reported. On Sunday evening, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9 rattled Tokyo and eastern Japan, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Taiwan’s central government had warned earlier of avalanche dangers after Morakot battered the island, dumping record rains of more than eight feet across the south. Helicopters took rescuers into the landslide site, in Kaohsiung County, and officials said accurate information on the situation was likely to emerge before daylight Tuesday. Rescue efforts were complicated by continuing rain from Typhoon Morakot, which swept across the island on Saturday.
The Reuters news service quoted an army general involved in the rescue effort, Richard Hu, as saying that “no small number of single-story homes have been covered” by the mudslide.
More than 170,000 people remained without power on Monday, the government said.
In China, one of the reported dead was a 4-year-old child in Wenzhou, a city of nearly 1.4 million people in Zhejiang Province, where officials said the storm had leveled nearly 1,500 homes. The child was among five people buried when the winds collapsed five adjacent houses.
The weakened storm was still churning over Wenzhou on Monday morning. Skies there had cleared, but heavy rain was predicted later. “I’m living in the center of town, which is not so bad,” one woman, Yang Weiwei, said from Wenzhou in a telephone interview. “However, some parts of the city are in a mess.”
On Sunday, the authorities said the storm had whipped up waves as high at 26 feet in the East China Sea and in the strait between mainland China and Taiwan.
Typhoon Morakot, the eighth of the season, hit the Chinese mainland at 4:20 p.m. on Sunday at Xiapu County, in northern Fujian Province. China’s state-run Xinhua news service said more than 490,000 people had been moved to safety in Fujian, and 48,000 boats summoned back to harbor.
In Zhejiang Province, between Fujian and Shanghai, 505,000 others were evacuated and 35,000 boats called in.
Both provinces are manufacturing centers with large port cities. Shanghai, just north of the typhoon’s landfall, was spared the worst winds but canceled airline flights and lowered river reservoirs to prepare for flooding. Trees were uprooted and some snapped apart in Fujian Province, Xinhua reported, and farmers struggled with nets to recapture fish flushed out of fish farms.
Xinhua said relief teams were distributing food and water to rural villagers who had been stranded by high waters. By Sunday night, meteorologists reported that the typhoon had degraded close to tropical storm status, with 74-mile-an-hour winds.
The government reported that more than 83,000 Philippines residents were affected by floodwaters and landslides, and 22,000 had been evacuated.
No comments:
Post a Comment