Torrential rain lashes southern Taiwan, leaving five dead and over 5,900 evacuated

TAIPEI - Five people died and more than 5,900 have been evacuated in southern Taiwan after the island recorded more than a year’s worth of rainfall over the past week, which caused widespread landslides and flooding.

Three people are missing and 77 have been injured since late July when a depression and strong south-westerly airstreams began causing flooding and landslides in Taiwan’s south, an area vital for the island’s agriculture sector.

More than 2.6m of rain was dumped on parts of the mountainous south in the past seven days, according to the Central Weather Administration, compared with the average annual rainfall of about 2.1m in subtropical Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Premier Cho Jung-tai – who on Aug 4 visited residents in the southern city of Tainan that had been hit hard by Typhoon Danas and recent heavy rain – said his Cabinet was working to propose a special budget this week to provide relief efforts.

“We rarely encountered such a severe storm before. It has been a month since Typhoon Danas hit, and it has been raining continuously ever since,” Mr Cho said.

The government said more than 2,000 people were still forced to stay away from their homes, mostly in the mountainous villages in the southern Kaohsiung and Pingtung counties where rescuers were working to restore roads cut off by landslides or flooding and deliver food and medical supplies.

Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chi-mai told reporters on Aug 3: “This can be said to be the largest evacuation in terms of the number of people evacuated in the past decade or so.

“Please don’t go up the mountain. It’s really, really dangerous.”

The rain was likely to subside from Aug 4, weather authorities said, as warnings for landslide and flooding continued for the southern mountains.

Typhoon Danas lashed southern Taiwan with record winds in July,

in a rare hit to the island’s densely populated west coast, which knocked down more than 3,000 electric poles in the worst damage to the island’s power grid in decades. REUTERS