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Powerful storm hits Taiwan, millions without power, four dead - Printable Version

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Powerful storm hits Taiwan, millions without power, four dead - IceWizard - 08-08-2015

Sat Aug 8, 2015 4:51am EDT
TAIPEI/YILAN, Taiwan (Reuters) -
A powerful typhoon battered Taiwan on Saturday with strong wind and torrential rain, cutting power to nearly 3 million households and killing four people.

By mid-day, as the eye of Typhoon Soudelor
passed Taiwan, four people were missing and
64 injured and hundreds of flights delayed or
canceled, authorities said. More than 7,500 people have been evacuated.

The storm made landfall early in the morning on the island's east-coast counties of Yilan and Hualien, bringing up to 1,000 mm (39 inches) of rain in mountainous northeastern areas and wind gusting up to 200 kph (124 mph).

"This is one of the worst typhoons I have ever
seen," said a sewage station engineer
surnamed Jiang, who was inspecting pumping
stations early on Saturday. "My car was shaking when I was driving. There are too many trees down, and I even saw six downed power poles."

A rescue worker was killed by a passing car as
he tried to clear downed branches from a road
and a foreign worker died when he was hit by a falling sign, authorities said.

As the storm approached over the Pacific
Ocean on Friday, a child and an adult were
killed in rough seas off the coast of Yilan. In the capital, Taipei, large steel sheets and
rods were blown off a half-constructed stadium
and city authorities shut down a growing number of bus and subway services.

Authorities issued flood and mudslide alerts and television showed a fallen wind turbine,
mudslides trapping people, and flood nearly
covering the roofs of cars in some areas.

More rain and wind has been forecast for late
Saturday and Sunday.

Taiwan Power, the island's main power
company, said 2.94 million households had lost
power. While some supplies had been restored, two million households were still without power on Saturday afternoon, the company said.

Authorities began evacuating people as the
storm approached and the island's military put
tens of thousands of troops and thousands of
vehicles on stand-by for rescue operations.

The Tropical Storm Risk website said the
typhoon was a category 2 storm on Saturday,
on a scale of 1 to 5, and could weaken to a
category 1 as it leaves Taiwan.

Soudelor has drawn comparisons with 2009's
Typhoon Morakot, which cut a wide path of
destruction over southern Taiwan, leaving about 700 people dead or missing and causing $3 billion worth of damage.

Soudelor is expected to cross the Taiwan Strait and hit the Chinese province of Fujian late on Saturday. Authorities there have evacuated people on the coast.

Typhoons are common at this time of year in the South China Sea and Pacific, picking up
strength from warm waters before losing
strength over land.


(Reporting by Taipei newsroom; Writing by J.R.
Wu; Editing by Robert Birsel)


RE: Powerful storm hits Taiwan, millions without power, four dead - Charon - 08-08-2015

very sad, indeed.

i cannot imagine what they are going through now.