Typhoon Morakot has killed at least 124 people and left 56 missing in Taiwan as of 10 p.m. Saturday, according to local disaster response authorities.

Another 45 people were injured after the typhoon, the worst on the island in nearly five decades, wreaked havoc across central and southern regions.

Sixty-six people died in Kaohsiung, 25 in Tainan, 16 in Pingdong, six in Chiayi, seven in Nantou, three in Changhua and one in Yunlin.

Nearly 23,700 people have been evacuated, and almost 5,000 are taking refuge in 170 sheltering camps.

Morakot has caused more than 12 billion New Taiwan Dollars (365million U.S. dollars) in damages to agriculture and forestry. Among the worst-hit regions are Pingdong, Kaohsiung and Tainan.

People from a wide range of social sectors in Taiwan have donated cash and materials worth millions of New Taiwan Dollars to support the disaster-relief work.

Charities and enterprises on the mainland also offered relief-assistance to the island.

On Saturday, an official with the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said the mainland will provide any necessary relief materials needed by Taiwan compatriots affected by the typhoon.

The office has requested factories to manufacture portable shelters day and night, and the first batch is expected to arrive in Taiwan Monday at the soonest.

Typhoon Morakot kills 124, injures 45 in Taiwan

Trying to repair its image after Typhoon Morakot caused widespread landslides in southern Taiwan, the government on Friday asked major world donors for equipment, a foreign ministry official said. Aid offers were initially refused on Tuesday.

“In our first message, we said we didn’t need help, just money,” said Joanne Ou, head of the ministry’s publicity section. “But on (Thursday) the ministry asked the disaster center what we needed. We asked them for a list.”

Local media, reflecting public sentiment, bashed the government for declining aid earlier in the week.

The ministry has approached Japan, the United States and European countries for supplies such as large helicopters and mobile homes, Ou said.

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, pressured by the public over his response to the typhoon damage, on Friday estimated the eventual death toll at more than 500, mostly people feared buried in a massive landslide in one mountain village.

COULD DRAIN SUPPORT

Survivors and Taiwan’s main opposition party have accused Ma of responding too slowly to the typhoon that hit last weekend, the island’s worst since 1959. The official death toll is 123.

Ma, touring a disaster area in central Taiwan, apologized on Saturday.

“Ma said the government response was a bit slow and expressed apologies for that,” his spokesman Tony Wang said.

Sustained pressure on Ma, who was elected in 2008, could drain support for his Nationalist Party (KMT) in city and county elections in December, analysts say.

The foreign aid snafu pointed to poor communication between government offices and may be remembered, said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taipei.

Taiwan seeks foreign aid after typhoon catastrophe

The tyhoon, locally known as Emong, has also displaced nearly 10,000 local residents since it slammed into the Northern Luzon region late Thursday, the National Disaster Coordinating Council said in its latest bulletin.

According to the official report, low-lying villages and towns were flooded, a boat capsized, a dike collapsed and in parts of the typhoon-hit areas roads and bridges remain unusable.

The weather forecast said the typhoon is moving northeast at a speed of 11 kph with maximum sustained winds of 55 kph. It is forecasted to arrive some 520 kilometers northeast of Aparri town of northern Cagayan province yesterday evening and head towards further north.

At least 22 killed as typhoon ‘Emong’ leaves

The Spanish authorities said the four children were killed and several others injured near Barcelona on Saturday when the roof of a sports center collapsed in high winds. A spokeswoman for the Catalan government said the children had been sheltering from the wind in the sports hall in Sant Boi de Llobregat, just south of Barcelona, when the roof and some of the walls collapsed.

Jaume Bosch, mayor of Sant Boi, said the children were 9 to 12 years old, according to the Web site of La Vanguardia, a Barcelona-based newspaper. The spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of anonymity under government rules, said seven other children and two adults were injured, one of them seriously. Emergency services had pulled everyone free of the rubble of the building by midafternoon, she said.

Photographs of the collapsed building on the Web site of La Vanguardia showed a large, corrugated iron roof caved in over a pile of concrete rubble. Witnesses said about 30 children had been preparing to play baseball and decided to take shelter inside the building.

José Antonio Godina, a parent of one of the children in the sports center who was quoted by the Web site of El Mundo newspaper, said the scene was “horrific.”

“We heard a very loud noise and we thought it was a tree falling on a roof,” he said. “But when we got there, the roof of the building had literally flown off and the walls had collapsed on them.”

The newspaper did not say whether Godina’s child was among the injured.

In northern Spain and southern France, the gales, which reached 160 kilometers an hour, or 100 miles an hour, cut power supplies and closed airports and roads.

The authorities on both sides of the border called on people to stay indoors and stay clear of beaches and harbors as eight-meter waves pounded the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.

The local authorities in the Landes region of France said one person was killed and one seriously injured when a tree fell on a car, according to Reuters. In Spain, the police said three other people had been killed in Catalonia, one by a falling wall and two by falling trees. Two men, including one police officer, were killed in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, the police said.

In France, the national power grid manager, Électricité Réseau Distribution France, said nearly 1.2 million homes were cut off. Fecsa, the electricity grid manager in Catalonia, said tens of thousands of people in the northeastern region of four million inhabitants were without power.

The French agriculture minister, Michel Barnier, said the storm was “the worst since 1999,” when a huge storm killed 88 people in France and left nearly four million people without electricity, according to Reuters. He said France would call on the European Union to help finance reconstruction efforts once the extent of the damage becomes clear.

The French interior minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, said she had ordered that 700 extra security forces be sent to the region to help with rescue efforts and that extra equipment also be sent to help clear roads and electric lines.

High winds kill 10 in Spain and France – International Herald Tribune

Civil guard police reinforced the border near the 30-metre (yard) stretch of damaged wall, which was built to stem a flow of Africans trying to get into Spain in search of work, the Spanish government’s office in the city said.

Air and sea traffic to the city stopped during the storm. The River Oro burst its banks and television showed trees washed along flooded streets.

Weather services forecast heavy rain to continue lashing Melilla, which is one of two small Spanish enclaves in North Africa, both of which are claimed by Morocco.

Reuters AlertNet

Once over land, Marco quickly weakened to a tropical depression and was expected to dissipate as it moved over Mexico’s mountainous terrain. Forecasters still warned that rains of up to 5 inches could unleash mudslides.

The storm flooded coastal highways and brought heavy rains to the coast, including the city of Veracruz. But the busy port appeared to have escaped most of the storm’s wrath.

The storm also appeared to have spared water-logged southern Veracruz state, where rain-swollen rivers jumped their banks, leaving the towns of Minatitlan and Hidalgotitlan under 10 feet (3 meters) of water last week.

Veracruz state authorities closed schools and set up some 200 shelters, while soldiers and rescue officials bused people from low-lying communities.

Mexico’s state oil company said it had evacuated 33 workers from four offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, closed six wells and shut down a natural gas processing plant in Veracruz state ahead of Marco’s arrival.

Mexico’s Communications and Transportation Department also ordered the small ports of Nautla and Alvarado closed to small vessels.

The storm hit land about 55 miles (90 kilometers) north of Veracruz with winds near hurricane strength. It was a tightly wound cyclone, with tropical-storm-force winds extending only about 15 miles (30 kilometers) from the center, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Mexico, Norbert strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane over the Pacific Ocean late Monday and forecasters said it could hit the southern Baja California Peninsula by the weekend before bringing rain to the northern Mexican mainland.

The hurricane center said Norbert was centered 545 miles (875 kilometers) south-southeast of the tip of the peninsula early Tuesday and it was moving west-northwest at 9 mph (15 kph). It had maximum sustained winds of near 85 mph (140 kph) and was likely to strengthen.

Tropical Storm Marco hits Mexico’s Gulf coast – Yahoo! News

Higos was formed on Tuesday in the Pacific Ocean, coming on the heels of tropical storms Jangmi and Hagupit, which combined killed around 20 people in China.

The National Meteorological Center issued an orange alert on Friday, the second highest warning, warning shipping vessels to take to port. It urged local authorities to prepare for an emergency, with strong wind and rainstorms forecast.

China Business News – BizChinaUpdate – Typhoon Higos Hits China

The newly formed tropical storm is named Higos, which means “fig” in Spanish. At press time yesterday, the bureau said the center of Higos was located 610km southeast of Manila, which is about 1,600km from Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻). The storm was moving northwesterly at a speed of 20kph. The radius of the storm was 200km.

CWB forecast center director Daniel Wu (吳德榮) said the tropical storm is near the Philippines, and its structure may be damaged by land there.

It was unlikely that the storm’s intensity will gradually increase at this stage, Wu said.

Nonetheless, Wu said sea temperatures from the east of the Philippines over to the South China Sea are still quite warm at this time of year. Even after the storm sweeps across the Philippines, it is in an ideal environment for developing into a typhoon, he said.

Wu said the bureau would be better able to determine the situation tomorrow.

If Higos does approach Taiwan, it would be the fourth weekend in a row that a storm will have threatened the nation. Typhoon Sinlaku hit Taiwan on Sept. 14, Hagupit loomed off Taiwan’s coast on Sept. 21, and Jangmi just left on Monday after battering the nation with strong winds and rain.

The bureau yesterday added that a dry seasonal northeast wind is expected to arrive today and may lower temperatures in the north to 22°C or 23°C.

In related news, the Council of Agriculture said yesterday that Jangmi caused the nation some NT$1.37 billion (US$42.5 million) in agricultural damage. Broken down by sector, NT$1.22 billion in crops were lost, translating into 15,491 hectares of land, with rice paddies being the hardest hit, and grapes, bananas and other fruits also being affected. Nearly NT$5.61 million was lost in livestock and the COA said that almost 110,000 chickens died because of the typhoon.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education yesterday said it would allocate NT$15 million in emergency assistance for schools damaged by Jangmi to help them re-open.

Around the country, 56 schools remained closed yesterday because of typhoon damage, the ministry said, adding that it was the worst typhoon damage in recent years.

Taipei Times – archives

A further 58 people were reported to have been injured by Jangmi, which was downgraded to a tropical storm, as it was forecast to churn towards Japan.

Authorities in China ordered hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate from the country’s southeast coast, despite the storm losing momentum as it approached the area.

In central Taiwan, a woman on a motorbike was killed when she was hit by a broken cable, while an elderly man was blown over by fierce winds and drowned in a rice paddy.

A tourist bus flipped over in strong winds in northeastern Ilan county late Sunday, injuring 35 people, the National Fire Agency said.

Residents were told to take precautions from continued downpours and possible flooding, while more than 3,000 residents were evacuated from remote villages, and fishing boats sought shelter at ports, it added.

Jangmi, meaning “rose” in Korean, made landfall Sunday packing gusts of up to 191 kilometres (115 miles) per hour, the Central Weather Bureau said.

The Civil Aeronautics Administration said 116 domestic and 35 international flights had been cancelled as of 5:00am Monday (2100 GMT Sunday) but that most schedules would return to normal during the day.

Railway services were also suspended Sunday.

Separately, a yacht with four US citizens on board was reported missing in waters south of the East China Sea, the Japan Coast Guard said.

In China, the authorities evacuated more than 460,000 people from the eastern coast, and tens of thousands of fishing boats were ordered back to shore as the storm approached Monday, state media reported.

China’s National Meteorological Observatory however said Fujian and Zhejiang provinces might be spared as Jangmi weakened and moved northward, Xinhua news agency reported.

But the observatory said there was still a chance the storm could change course and make landfall on the mainland, the report said.

Rescue teams based in the southeastern Chinese city of Xiamen on Sunday helped bring 27 Taiwanese sailors and 10 others from various countries, mostly Indonesians, to safety, after their vessels struggled in the Taiwan Strait.

AFP: Typhoon leaves two dead, closes markets in Taiwan

The Central Weather Bureau urged residents in eastern and northern Taiwan on Saturday to beware of strong winds and heavy rains being whipped up by Typhoon Jangmi.

The bureau says that as of 12:15 p.m. (0415 GMT) Saturday, Jangmi was about 341 miles (550 kilometers) east of Taiwan’s southern tip.

It says the typhoon is packing winds of 118 miles per hour (191 kilometers per hour) and moving northwest at 12 mph (20 kph).

The bureau warns that if Jangmi stays on its current course, it will strike Taiwan early Monday morning.

Taiwan braces for Typhoon Jangmi – CNN.com