TAIPEI, Taiwan — A mudslide touched off by a deadly typhoon buried a remote mountain village in Taiwan, leaving at least 400 people unaccounted for, while a massive landslide in China toppled seven apartment buildings, an official said today.
Typhoon Morakot slammed Taiwan over the weekend with as much as 80 inches of rain before crossing the 112-mile-wide Taiwan Strait and hitting China.
The storm inflicted the worst flooding the island has seen in at least half a century, submerging large swaths of farmland in muck and swamping city streets.
Taiwanese authorities put the confirmed death toll in Taiwan at 38, but that seemed certain to rise.
A disaster appeared to be unfolding at the southern village of Shiao Lin, hit by a mudslide about 6 a.m. Sunday — while many people were asleep — and now cut off by land from the outside world.
Speaking to The Associated Press, a Taiwanese police official who identified himself only by his surname, Wang, said 400 people were unaccounted for in the village. Wang said 100 people had been rescued or otherwise avoided the brunt of the disaster.
A rescued villager, Lin Chien-chung, told the United Evening News he believes as many as 600 people were buried in the mudslide. “A part of the mountain above us just fell on the village,” Lin was quoted as saying.
Under leaden skies, military helicopters hovered over the community, dropping food and looking for survivors. They were unable to land because of the slippery terrain.
Shiao Lin was cut off after floodwaters destroyed a bridge about 8 miles away. A backroad wending its way northward toward the mountain community of Alishan was also thought to be cut off, and with rain still falling in the area, the prospects for an early resumption of overland travel were poor.
Elsewhere in Taiwan, an additional 62 people were listed as missing.
The typhoon’s path took it almost directly over the capital. Taipei, but its most destructive effects were in the heavily agricultural south and along the island’s densely foliated mountain spine. Shiao Lin is on Taiwan’s southwestern coast.
Morakot slammed Sunday into China’s Fujian province. The heavy rains triggered a massive landslide in Pengxi, a town in Wenzhou city of eastern China’s Zhejiang province, destroying seven three-story apartment buildings at the foot of a mountain late Monday, an official surnamed Chen from the Pengxi government told AP.
Xinhua reported an unknown number of residents were buried in the landslide, but Chen said there were only six people there at the time and they were all pulled out alive, although two later died.
