Tainan: Four people died and more than 5,900 have been evacuated in southern Taiwan after the island recorded more than a year's rainfall over the past week, causing widespread landslides and flooding.
According to Bahrain News Agency, three people are missing and 77 have been injured since late July when a depression and strong southwesterly airstreams began causing flooding and landslides in Taiwan's south, an area vital for the island's agriculture sector. More than 2.6 meters (102.3 inches) of rain were dumped on parts of the mountainous south in the past seven days, compared to average annual rainfall of about 2.1 meters in subtropical Taiwan.
Taiwan's premier, Cho Jung-tai, who visited residents in the southern city of Tainan, 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," Cho said.
The government reported that more than 2,000 people were still forced to stay away from their homes, mostly in the mountainous villages in southern Kaohsiung and Pingtung county where rescuers were working to restore roads cut off by landslides or flooding and deliver food and medical supplies. Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chi-mai emphasized the scale of the evacuation, stating, "This can be said to be the largest evacuation in terms of the number of people evacuated in the past decade or so." He cautioned residents, "Please don't go up the mountain. It's really, really dangerous."
Weather authorities indicated that the rain was likely to subside from Monday, although warnings for landslides and flooding continued for southern mountains. Typhoon Danas previously lashed southern Taiwan with record winds in July, severely impacting the island's power grid by knocking down more than 3,000 electric poles in a rare hit to the densely populated west coast.