REPORT: The toll from the already deadly Typhoon Morakot in the Pacific threatened to soar on Tuesday, as huge mudslides buried a rural village in south-central Taiwan and seven apartment buildings in coastal China, leaving two dead and hundreds of people unaccounted for.
The Taiwan mudslide, triggered early Sunday by as much as eight feet of typhoon-spawned rain, apparently buried 400 to 500 people in the village of Hsiao-lin, an official at Taiwan’s National Disasters Prevention and Protection Commission said in a telephone interview. However, torrential rains washed out bridges and roads leading to the area, and the figure could not be quickly verified.
A spokesman at Taiwan’s Central Emergency office, Wang Qingen, said rescuers had established that more than 100 homes had been buried in the Hsiao-lin mudslide. But, he said, any estimate of the number of people trapped inside them was speculative. Helicopters ferried some rescuers to the scene and carried out scores of survivors. But ground crews were still slowly making their way to the site on Tuesday.
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