Over 700 people in two villages are trapped by mudslides that struck after Typhoon Morakot, reports CLIFFORD COONANin Kaohsiung, Taiwan
RESCUERS WERE working frantically yesterday to airlift villagers from remote communities in Kaohsiung county in southern Taiwan as fears grew for the lives of over 700 people trapped by enormous mudslides in two villages after Typhoon Morakot ravaged the island.
It was still raining heavily in the southern part of Taiwan, making rescue efforts difficult as helicopters tried to get to people buried in the villages of Hsiao Lin and other townships in the area.
Aerial photographs of Hsiao Lin released by the Taiwanese army showed a village simply lost beneath mud, rocks and water, with only palm trees standing above the deluge. Shiao Lin remains cut off after a bridge was wrecked by floodwaters.
“There are still a lot of people trapped inside,” survivor Lin Mei-ying told Taiwanese television station ETTV. “Please go faster, so they can be saved.”
Going faster is made difficult by the appalling weather. Army helicopters had to fly through dense fog to get to Hsiao Lin, and soldiers had to jump off as the aircraft were unable to land. Many of the survivors spent four days huddled at the entrance to a tunnel above a broad expanse of water.
Leng Chia-yu, a spokesman at Taiwan’s disaster response agency, said there were originally 150 buildings in Shiao Lin, but now only one or two are left.
Over 300 people were brought out of Shiao Lin and nearby villages on up to 120 helicopter flights to an improvised landing zone at Cishan junior high school.
The flooding had eased late last night, and aircraft were able to drop off soldiers to look for survivors, but rescue work remains extremely hazardous, and one helicopter crashed into a mountain as it flew over Pingdong on the south of the island, which bore the brunt of Morakot as it hit Taiwan.
The typhoon, whose name means “emerald” in Thai, has brought the worst flooding in half a century to Taiwan. So far the official death toll is 62 people confirmed dead in Taiwan with 35 injured and 57 missing; but the final toll could be much worse as the preliminary figure does not include Hsiao Lin.
Some of those found dead were swept away in their cars by the force of the typhoon. One man was swept along for nearly two kilometres by the mudslide, and survived by holding onto a log.
A woman rescued on Monday told Taiwan’s China Times newspaper that she fled with her husband and their baby from their two-story Shiao Lin home minutes before the mudslide buried it.
“We heard two loud bangs . . . the sky was filled with dust like a volcanic eruption, and flood waters, mud and rocks streamed onto the roads,” one woman told the China Times. She and her husband fled with their baby just before the mudslide hit.
Alarming images from Morakot’s onslaught showed the six-story King Shai hotel collapse into a river in Taidong city as its foundations gave way, although residents had been evacuated before it slid into the water.
Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, sought to rally the people after the country’s worst natural disaster for years.
“We should place special attention on the reconstruction and make sure we raise our standards so that such a matter will not happen again,” Mr Ma said in a statement.
Across the Strait of Taiwan, China evacuated 1.5 million people before Morakot, the ninth typhoon of the Pacific cyclone season, reached its eastern coast two days ago.
Heavy rains triggered a massive landslide in Pengxi, a town in Wenzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, destroying seven three-storey apartment buildings at the foot of a mountain. All of the residents were rescued but two later died of their injuries. In all, eight people died and thousands of homes were destroyed in mainland China, according to the civil affairs ministry.
A separate tropical storm caused flooding and mudslides in Japan’s southwest on Sunday, killing 13 people. To compound the weather-borne misery, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake occurred early yesterday near Japan’s coast, damaging buildings in the southwest and injuring more than 50 people.
By yesterday afternoon, Morakot had moved into the Yellow Sea, and it was expected to gradually pose less of a threat to coastal provinces in eastern China.