HUALIEN, Taiwan: Fourteen people have died in Taiwan's eastern county of Hualien with 124 missing after a barrier lake in the mountains overflowed to deluge a town during a typhoon, the island's fire department said on Wednesday (Sept 24).
Taiwan has been lashed since Monday by the outer rim of Super Typhoon Ragasa, now heading for China's southern coast and the Asian financial hub of Hong Kong.
The barrier lake, formed by landslides triggered by earlier heavy rain in Taiwan's sparsely populated east, burst its banks on Tuesday afternoon to send a wall of water into the township of Guangfu.
Fire officials said all the dead and missing were in Guangfu.
Wang Tse-an said his entire village of Dama, home to about 1,000 people in the township, had been flooded and many were still stranded.
"It's chaotic now," Wang, the village chief, told Reuters, adding that the most important task was to get people to safety in shelters, while supplies could not get through.
"There are mud and rocks everywhere. Some flooding has subsided but some remains."
Regions across Taiwan have sent rescue teams to Hualien.
About 5,200 people, or about 60 per cent of Guangfu's population, sought shelter on the higher floors of their own homes while most of the rest left to stay with their families, government data showed.
The government estimated the barrier lake contained 91 million tonnes of water, enough to fill about 36,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools and the equivalent of a major reservoir in southern Taiwan.
The lake overflowed to release about 60 million tonnes of water, the government said.
The typhoon brought about 70 cm of rain to Taiwan's east.
In 2009, Typhoon Morakot cut a swathe of destruction through the south, killing about 700 and causing damage of up to US$3 billion. - Reuters
