SINFA, Taiwan — Barefoot and helmeted, the frightened survivors of deadly Typhoon Morakot dangled high over jagged rocks and a raging river Thursday as soldiers hauled them to safety one by one along a 100-foot-long cable.
On the far side, a few dozen waited near a hand-painted sign on the craggy foundation of a destroyed bridge: “32 people died here SOS.”
The perilous rescue was part of a military effort to save hundreds of stranded villagers after the worst flooding to hit Taiwan in 50 years. About 14,000 villagers have been rescued since the typhoon struck last weekend; hundreds more are feared missing or dead.
As criticism mounted Thursday over Taiwan’s response to the disaster, the government dispatched another 4,000 soldiers to work with the 14,000 already deployed. Many of them are working in Kaohsiung County, a mountainous farming region in southern Taiwan.
Soldiers resorted to using a makeshift zipline to haul survivors from the village of Sinkai over the Ba Si Lan River, where the bridge was wiped out. For hours they labored, rescuing everyone from a boy in shorts to an elderly woman who brought along a couple of shopping bags’ worth of belongings.
Unbuckled from their harnesses, villagers looked dazed and frightened as they recalled the harrowing night of Aug. 8.
“It rained for days,” said Li Wen-chuan, a grizzled-looking man of 68 with sparse salt-and-pepper hair, teeth stained red by years of betel-nut chewing. “But the flood came so suddenly and with a tremendous roar. It destroyed everything in the village.”
The ravaged villages — most of them scattered in neighboring townships in northern Kaohsiung County — are typically next to mountains and usually have to brace for mudslides during Taiwan’s annual typhoon season during June to September. But this time was different, residents said.
“Everything happened so fast. Flooding just destroyed everything,” said Pan Yi-chang, 32, adding that she was lucky because all of her family survived — her husband, her two children and her mother and father.
Many complained that the government was too slow to mobilize the rescue and cleanup effort, saying more victims could have been saved if they had moved sooner and faster.
In an interview with CNN, President Ma Ying-jeou blamed the severe damage brought by the flooding on villagers’ inability to get out of their communities before the storm. Authorities in Kaohsiung County did ask inhabitants from the villages most severely battered by Morakot to leave before the storm, but they did not try to forcibly remove the residents, and some villagers decided against leaving.
“They were not fully prepared. If they were, they should have been evacuated much earlier,” Ma said. “They didn’t realize how serious the disaster was.”
Ma did not comment on whether the government was doing enough to help with the evacuation.
Troops were working Thursday to restore severed roads, rehabilitate ravaged neighborhoods and ferry typhoon victims to safety in dozens of helicopter missions.
