Flooding is common during the summer monsoon season in southern China, but rainfall has been particularly heavy this year and many areas have been lashed by torrential rains this week. / AFP PHOTO /
BEIJING, China (AFP) — A tropical storm in China has left 10 people dead and 11 missing, reports said Monday, after it lashed Taiwan with typhoon-grade winds and rain.
Super Typhoon Nepartak brought chaos to Taiwan Friday, forcing more than 15,000 people to flee their homes as part of the island saw its strongest winds in over a century.
It had weakened into a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in Fujian province on Saturday, but still wreaked havoc, with pictures showing cars upended, buildings ripped apart and towns left wallowing in a thick sludge of brown mud.
By late Sunday more than 200,000 residents in 10 mainland cities had been temporarily relocated and some 1,900 homes destroyed, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the civil affairs ministry.
Ten people had been killed and 11 were missing as of 5 pm local time on Monday, Xinhua later reported, while saying that direct economic losses had reached 2.2 billion yuan ($330 million).
Power was cut for hundreds of thousands in Fujian, while five airports were closed and hundreds of high-speed train journeys cancelled, the Global Times newspaper reported Monday.
Nepartak killed three people in Taiwan injured more than 300, according to the island’s central emergency operation centre.
China’s national meteorological centre on Monday put out a blue alert for heavy rain across 14 provinces and regions — the lowest in a four-tiered warning system.
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