Typhoon Winnie, which has caused death and devastation in the Philippines, Taiwan, and China, has struck North Korea adding to the list of victims in the past 36 hours. Unusually high tides have caused serious damage to farmland in the latest in a series of natural disasters to afflict the famine-hit communist country.
Its official media reported yesterday that seas surged more than two metres (6 ft) this week in three south-western coastal provinces (South Hwanghae and North and South Pyongang) inundating paddies, fields and buildings.
"As of August 21st sea-water overflowed coastal embankments at scores of points, inundating more than 25,000 hectares (62,500 acres) of paddy fields," said the Korean Central News Agency report, monitored in Tokyo.
The tidal flooding follows a severe heatwave in July, which Pyongyang said seriously damaged about one-fifth of its arable land, and devastating floods in 1995 and 1996 that aggravated food shortages in the isolated Stalinist state.
On Thursday, South Korea's National Unification Ministry said hardship in hunger-stricken North Korea was expected to worsen next year, due partly to the drought's effects on crops.
An official from the ministry indicated that South Korea would soon announce new aid to North Korea in addition to the $16 million (£11 million) it has promised so far this year. The United States has led international efforts to provide food supplies to the North, pledging $52 million so far this year through the United Nations World Food Programme.
Meanwhile, residents of China's eastern Zhejiang province appealed for help to rebuild their lives after Typhoon Winnie. Some reports put the death toll in the province as high as 242 people.
Red Cross officials said yesterday the death toll remained at 230 in Taizhou, the worst affected city, while in Wenzhou the figure was unchanged at 10. One person was also killed in Jinhua and in Shanghai, officials said. Taizhou relief workers said most of the victims died when their houses collapsed on them. They said 3,400 people remained stranded.
In Shijingken village, 120 kilometres (75 miles) north of Wenzhou, residents who have a per capita annual income of 3,000 yuan (£248) made from plum and sweet potato cultivation, asked for cash donations to help them after the storm wrecked their fields and isolated the village.
One villager said: "The only resource we have in this village is water. But we do not know how to market it."
Hong Kong, which has endured particularly savage weather during the past few months, was swamped by record rains yesterday. Heavy flooding in urban and rural areas plunged the former British colony into chaos.
More than 75 floods were reported, with many Hong Kong streets turning into rivers and shops and restaurants submerged. Half a dozen landslides were also reported.
The Hong Kong Observatory said more than 2,800 mm (11 inches) of rain fell in the territory this year, the heaviest amount in a more than a century.
As people in Korea, China, Taiwan and the Philippines counted the cost of typhoon damage, meteorologists warned California to prepare for devastating floods and mudslides as what could be the "storm of the century" brews in the Pacific Ocean. The effect of El Nino, the periodic warming of the southern ocean which is blamed as causing Typhoon Winnie, is set to hit the populous American state, forecasters say.
"This is looking to be a fairly massive event," Mr Daniel Cayan, director of the Climate Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, said. This year, however, the experts say El Nino, which is usually felt around Christmas time, giving it the Spanish name for boy-child, will arrive early, perhaps as soon as September, and may last well into next spring.