Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Record rains from a powerful typhoon caused massive mud- and rockslides in Taiwan that buried a Buddhist temple and trapped vehicles on a highway,where one bus carrying 19 Chinese tourists was missing.
The mudslide at the temple killed seven people,and overall,25 people were missing in Taiwan as Typhoo n Megi swept toward southern China,where landfall was expected late today or tomorrow. The storm earlier killed 26 people and damaged homes and crops in the Philippines.
Megi dumped a record 114 centimetres of rain in Taiwan’s Ilan county over 48 hours. It had winds of 145 kph and was about 440 kms southeast of Hong Kong today evening,the Hong Kong Observatory said.
Seven people were killed at the White Cloud Temple in Suao city along the eastern coast when a mudslide buried the building,Taiwanese cable TV stations reported. Rescuers were using bulldozers to try to dig out two other people,Ilan county chief Lin Tsong-hsien said.
Two buses carrying Chinese tourists were on a 10-km stretch of a coastal highway in Ilan that was hit by at least seven rockslides yesterday,Premier Wu Den-yih said.
Nineteen people on one bus were rescued,five with light to moderate injuries,but the Taiwanese driver and the Chinese tour guide were still missing,Wu said.
There had been no contact with the driver,tour guide and 19 tourists aboard the other bus,he said.
TV news reported a 500-meter stretch of the highway had collapsed. The rockslides trapped about 30 vans,buses and cars,officials said.
Air force helicopters were searching for the missing bus and some two dozen other travellers cut off by the rockslides,Interior Minister Chiang Yi-hua said. Those travellers were not in any immediate danger,officials said.
The storm dumped heavy rains throughout Taiwan,but Ilan,about 150 kms southeast of Taipei,was the hardest hit. Authorities said more than 2,500 residents had been evacuated.
Broad swaths of farmland in the county were under many feet of water.
Earlier this week,Megi killed more than two dozen people and damaged thousands of homes in the northern Philippines.
The storm also forced 55,000 Filipinos from their homes and caused about USD 175 million damage to infrastructure and crops,disaster officials said.
Megi was expected to hit China’s southern Guangdong and Fujian provinces between tonight and tomorrow,meteorologists said.
In Fujian,authorities said 161,800 people were evacuated to safer places.
