TAIPEI, Taiwan — A mudslide touched off by a typhoon buried a remote mountain village, leaving at least 400 people unaccounted for Monday. Military rescue helicopters were unable to land because of the slippery ground and dropped food to desperate survivors.
Typhoon Morakot slammed Taiwan over the weekend with as much as 80 inches of rain, inflicting the worst flooding the island has seen in at least a half-century.
The storm submerged large swaths of farmland in muck and swamped city streets before crossing the 112-mile-wide Taiwan Strait and hitting China, where it forced the evacuation of nearly 1 million people.
A disaster appeared to be unfolding around the isolated southern village of Shiao Lin, which was hit by a mudslide about 6 a.m. Sunday local time — while many people were asleep — and was 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.
One of the rescued villagers, an unidentified middle-aged man, told police that his family of 10 had been wiped out.
“They’re gone,” he said, according to a local photographer who overheard the exchange. “All gone.”
Another rescued villager, Lin Chien-chung, told the United Evening News that he thinks as many as 600 people were buried in the mudslide.
Under leaden gray skies, military helicopters hovered over the community, dropping food and looking for survivors.
Shiao Lin was cut off after floodwaters destroyed a bridge about 8 miles away. A back road 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, 54 people were listed as missing.
Authorities put the confirmed death toll in Taiwan at 14, but that seemed certain to rise.
The typhoon’s path took it almost directly over the capital of 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.
In Japan, meanwhile, Typhoon Etau slammed into the western coast Monday. Twelve people were killed, police said.
