At least 48 people have died and 22 are listed as missing after Typhoon Nari caused havoc in northern Taiwan with the biggest floods in a century, officials said Tuesday.
President Chen Shui-bian toured disaster-hit areas on an amphibious armoured vehicle as more than 10,000 people were evacuated from flooded areas in northern and central Taiwan.
"The search must not stop until all the people classed as missing are found," Chen said.
The stock market was closed, ground and air traffic disrupted and the mass rapid transport system in Taipei was paralysed.
The victims, residents of Taipei and Keelung, were either buried by mudslides or washed away by the floods, said the National Fire Administration (NFA).
More bodies of drowned people were found, and the toll was expected to rise further as rescuers dig through mud and rocks which crashed into houses overnight.
Twenty-seven people died around Taipei, 10 in the northern Keelung city, three in the southern Chiayi county, six in the central county of Miaoli, and one each in the northern counties of Hsinchu and Taoyuan.
About 8,000 soldiers were deployed to help in the rescue and clean-up operations, said defense ministry spokesman Huang Suey-sheng.
The evacuees were forced to take shelter as heavy downpours continued to pound the island, the NFA said.
More than 650,000 households suffered power and water outages, and telephone lines to some 360,000 households in northern Taiwan were cut off, it said.
The Central Weather Bureau said there had been as much as 1,255 millimetres (about 50 inches) of rainfall in some areas in the past two days.
"However, the worst is far from over," a meteorologist warned.
Further torrential rains were expected although Nari was losing momentum and could be downgraded from a tropical storm into a depression in a day, he said.
Nari's center was about 60 kilometres (36 miles) south-southwest of the central Taichung city at 5:00 pm (0900 GMT). Packing gusts of 65 kilometres (39 miles), the storm was churning west at an hourly speed of five kilometres (three miles).
Many rivers in northern and central Taiwan were swollen by downpours of up to 460 millimetres (18 and a half inches) in the 11 hours from midnight.
"Heavy rains have been recorded around the island this morning as Typhoon Nari continues to hover around central Taiwan," said an official from the weather bureau.
Taipei Deputy Mayor Ou Chin-teh warned that it would take months to get the capital's metro system back on track. "As the system is seriously flooded, it will be unable to resume full operations for half a year," he said.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of commuters in the greater Taipei area face severe delays on Wednesday, when officials hope to reopen schools and the stock market.
The city government called in military help to keep Taipei traffic running smoothly.
The basements of 4,130 buildings, largely in Taipei, were inundated, the economic ministry said. The government was forced for the first time to commandeer privately held water pumps.
The floods hit a slowing economy already likely to suffer fallout from the disruption caused to the US economy by last week's terror strikes.
But Lin Wei-shong, a professor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, downplayed the long-term impact.
"There might be a negative impact on the economy over the short term, but it is not expected to emerge as a deadly blow because major production lines were not damaged," he said -- TAIPEI (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
