CHISHAN: Typhoons pummelling East Asia have killed at least 61 people, with rescuers in Taiwan battling to find survivors of a mudslide that may have buried about 100 villagers, officials said Tuesday.
A total of 41 people were confirmed dead in Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot unleashed the island's worst flooding in half a century over the weekend.
At least 20 were killed as landslides and flooding wreaked a trail of destruction in China and Japan, where officials feared more damage after a powerful earthquake loosened rain-soaked ground southwest of Tokyo.
The Taiwanese government's National Fire Agency said 'about 100 people may have been buried alive' in the remote village of Hsiaolin, which could only be reached by helicopter with all road access to the mountainous area severed.
'My house is gone. We have been trapped for four days and we are scared,' one man from Hsiaolin told reporters after being airlifted to safety out of the submerged village in southern Taiwan.
Rescuers said they had airlifted a total of 134 people to safety in southern Taiwan including about 70 from Hsiaolin.
Morakot lashed Taiwan with three metres of rain over the weekend, submerging entire streets and bringing down bridges, said the fire agency.
With another 62 people missing, rescue missions were in full swing with authorities rushing out helicopters to remote areas in the centre and south of the island cut off by the fallen bridges and raging rivers.
In Pingtung county in southern Taiwan, thousands of people remained trapped in three coastal townships without electricity or drinking water.
The Apple Daily said one man in a flooded Pingtung town had single-handedly rescued about 100 people with a bamboo raft over the past two days.
In eastern China, a massive landslide triggered by torrential rain from Typhoon Morakot toppled seven older houses in one town, killing two people and injuring four, firefighters and residents said.
The four-storey buildings collapsed around 10:00 pm Monday night in the town of Pengxi in the coastal province of Zhejiang, which lies north of Taiwan.
Local resident Tang Zhonghai, whose house sits opposite the collapsed buildings, said he was startled awake by the landslide.
'At about 10 o'clock at night I heard a very loud noise. I thought it was an earthquake but I saw through the window that the old buildings had fallen down,' Tang told AFP.
'When I saw what had happened, I left home and tried to help the rescue.'
Typhoon Morakot has left a further six people dead and three missing on the Chinese mainland, the civil affairs ministry said late Monday, adding it also destroyed more than 6,000 houses.
Japan, following its early-hours 6.4 magnitude tremor, rushed out hundreds of troops after Typhoon Etau brought floods and landslides that killed at least 13 people and left 18 missing, police and officials said.
Heavy downpours have drenched Japan since the weekend and caused flooding in the worst-hit city of Sayo, in western Hyogo prefecture, where 12 of the deaths were reported after a swollen river burst its banks.
Typhoon Etau was Tuesday churning through the Pacific Ocean but veering east and away from Japan's coast. The typhoon, packing winds of up to 126 kilometres an hour, had originally been forecast to veer close to the densely populated region around Tokyo.
Japan's weather agency issued an alert for more 'possible landslides and sediment disasters' in the quake-hit areas, warning that the water-soaked earth may be unstable after being jolted by the strong tremor.
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