China mobilises troops for storm recovery effort
South-east China braced for more torrential rain today after Typhoon Saomai slammed into the region, killing 105 people and leaving another 190 missing.
More than 20,000 soldiers and paramilitary police were mobilised for relief efforts after Saomai, the strongest storm to strike the country since at least 1949, blacked out cities and wrecked more than 50,000 homes.
Saomai weakened to a tropical depression yesterday but was expected over the weekend to drench a swath of China’s south stretching from the coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian to the poor inland provinces of Jiangxi and Anhui.
Hardest-hit was Zhejiang, where the typhoon made landfall on Thursday, and the bulk of the deaths occurred in the city of Wenzhou, where at least 81 people were killed and 11 were missing, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It said Wenzhou suffered 4.5 billion yuan (€465m) in damage, including more than 18,000 flattened houses.
In Cangnan County on Wenzhou’s outskirts, 43 bodies including those of eight children were found in the debris of collapsed houses where they sought shelter from the storm, Xinhua said.
The state-run China Daily newspaper had a front-page photo of grieving relatives carrying the body of a victim dug out from the rubble in Cangnan. Another photo showed a man wading through murky, thigh-deep water next to a partially submerged car.
A landslide set off by heavy rains in Lishui, another city in Zhejiang, killed six people, Xinhua said.
Seventeen people died in neighbouring Fujian province, where Saomai destroyed crops, shut down mines and factories, and razed tens of thousands of homes. Power was knocked out in the cities of Fuding, Xiapu, Zherong, Fu’an and Ningde, state media said.
The inland province of Jiangxi suffered one death in its capital.
