Hundreds missing and school destroyed as storm batters Taiwan

About 400 people are missing in Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot caused a mudslide in a mountain village, say police. Military helicopters had rescued about 100 people from yesterday morning's mudslide in Shiao Lin village in the south of the island, officials said. One of the rescued villagers, Lin Chien-chung, said he believes that 600 people were buried in the mudslide and "that it covered a large part of the village,” reported the island’s United Evening News. The official death toll from Morakot in Taiwan stands at 14. Another 51 — not including the people in Shiao Lin — are listed as missing after the typhoon caused the worst flooding in five decades. China's Xinhua state news agency said it had caused 2.2bn yuan (£193m) damage in Taiwan as 143,000 hectares (357,400 acres) of farmland was damaged and nearly 9,000 businesses stopped work.

The typhoon dumped 2.5 metres of rain on the island, causing at least 3.4bn Taiwan dollars (£62m) in agricultural damage. Officials said 110,000 houses were left without power and 850,000 homes had no water. In Kaohsiung county, on the south of the island, a bridge collapse cut off a remote village of 1,300 residents. Local television reported 200 homes there had been buried in a mudslide. "It is not clear what the residents' situation is, but we are sure that Hsiaolin elementary school has been fully destroyed," Kaohsiung county magistrate, Yang Chiu-hsin, told reporters.

By today, authorities had evacuated around 500,000 people from Fujian province in China - where Morakot hit yesterday afternoon, bringing waves up to 8 metres (26ft).Thousands of ships were called back from sea. But disaster relief officials said more than 3.4 million people were affected in Zhejiang alone as hundreds of villages were flooded and more than 1,800 houses collapsed. A four-year-old boy died in Wenzhou city, the Guardian newspaper reported when winds and torrential rain brought down his home. Morakot is one of two strong storms across the Pacific region this weekend have left scores of people dead or missing. In Japan, at least 10 people died in flash floods caused by the approaching tropical storm Etau.

In south east Asia, typhoons and tropical storms are frequent between July and September. At least 34 people have died and millions of others been affected in the Asia-Pacific region after a typhoon and a tropical storm battered China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children