Typhoons Cause havoc & Kill People in Asia

Typhoon Morakot killed t least 14 people in Taiwan and left a swathe of destruction in southeastern China when it crossed the coast yesterday.

Photo: Typhoons Cause havoc & Kill People in Asia

According to Xinhua, the typhoon, the ninth of Pacific cyclone season, damaged the properties of at least 136,000 people in Xiapu country in Fujian province. It caused damage of 2.2 billion yuan ($322 million) and prompted the evacuation of almost 1 million people in eastern China, Bloomberg reports.

Local television reported that 200 homes in the village, Hsiaolin, were believed to have been buried in a mudslide.

Footage showed rescuers using a helicopter to pick up an elderly woman and her son trapped in the mud.

"It is not clear what the residents' situation is, but we are sure that Hsiaolin elementary school has been fully destroyed," Kaohsiung County Magistrate Yang Chiu-hsin told reporters, AFP reports.

The typhoon earlier lashed the Philippines, killing at least 22 people there, RTE.ie reports.

Meanwhile, another typhoon, Etau, hit western Japan today, causing floods and landslides that killed nine people. At least eight deaths were in Hyogo prefecture, police official Shigekazu Kamenobu said.

In India, landslides triggered by heavy rains killed at least 43 people in three remote villages in northern India. Twenty bodies were pulled from the debris Sunday after the landslide buried the villages in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand state a day earlier, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.