One of the deadliest typhoons to batter China in a decade has killed between 100 and 200 people and injured 3,000, with most casualties in homes that collapsed under the force of the storm, officials said yesterday. Typhoon Winnie, which was moving north after sweeping across the Philippines, slammed into China's eastern coastal province of Zhejiang early on Monday. It wreaked havoc for 11 hours, destroying tens of thousands of homes, flooding fields and damaging dams and sea dykes.
The dead and injured were residents of low-lying coastal areas, according to preliminary estimates, a provincial government official said. The storm toppled 100,000 houses, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless, he said.
The storm damaged 667,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) of farmland in Zhejiang province, causing direct economic losses of 18 billion yuan (£1.6 billion), the official said. Some people were killed by electric shocks from wires blown down by the high winds brought by the typhoon. But most deaths were caused by house collapses, the official said.
Some of those injured suffered fractures when they were hit by flying debris, and others were hurt when they blown off the road by the typhoon, he said.
In Taiwan, the typhoon killed 37 people and left six missing when apartment blocks collapsed under the storm's fury.
In the Philippines, flooding spawned by the storm killed 16 people and forced 60,000 to abandon their homes.
The typhoon rampaged through Zhejiang, cutting electric power and telephone lines and uprooting trees. Flood waters had trapped 30,000 people on Wednesday, and state media said rescue workers were battling the floods.
The death toll would have been higher if authorities in Zhejiang and neighbouring Jiangsu province and the city of Shanghai had not evacuated 790,000 people from coastal towns and villages in the path of the typhoon, officials said.
Electric power had been restored in most areas of Zhejiang, except in parts of the coastal cities of Ningbo, Taizhou and Zhoushan, the China Daily said. Airports in Taizhou and Zhoushan remained closed, it said.
In Shanghai, the typhoon flooded 2,000 hectares of vegetable farms and washed away 5,000 cubic metres of earthen works from a dike in the city's new eastern Pudong area, the newspaper reported.