Stricken Taiwanese airlifted as 70 killed in storm

CISHAN, Taiwan — Military helicopters ferried stricken villagers to safety Tuesday from remote Taiwanese communities hit by Typhoon Morakot that left at least 70 dead, but hundreds more were still feared trapped by a torrent of mud and rock that buried their homes.

Choppers hovered over affected villages looking for signs of life. While rains were still falling, floodwaters receded Tuesday, and many of the aircraft were landing to send out squads of soldiers to look for survivors, photos released by the military showed.

One helicopter crashed into a mountain as it flew on a mission to rescue villagers from the island's heavily wooded south, which was worst hit by the storm. Disaster official Chen Chung-hsien said it was unclear if the two pilots and one technician had survived the crash.

Morakot, which means "emerald" in Thai language, dumped as much as 80 inches (two meters) of rain over the weekend on Taiwan, the worst flooding in 50 years. It then moved on to China, where authorities evacuated 1.5 million people and some 10,000 homes were destroyed.

Eight people have died in three provinces in eastern China, the Civil Affairs Ministry said. Taiwanese authorities put the confirmed death toll from Morakot at 62 and listed 57 people as missing, but that does not include residents in the village of Shiao Lin, where several hundred remain unaccounted for after a mudslide buried their farming settlement on Sunday.

Officials said more than 300 people were brought out Tuesday on up to 120 helicopter flights to an improvised landing zone at Cishan Junior High School. The people, many looking dazed and bewildered, came from Shiao Lin and surrounding villages.

At the landing strip, a Taiwanese army Huey helicopter arrived with three women from the mudslide-ravaged area on one of Tuesday's last flights. They were led to a waiting van and driven off to a shelter housing victims of the disaster.

On the fringes of the landing strip, anxious relatives waited for words of their loved ones.

"I have seven relatives in Shiao Lin whom I haven't heard from since Aug. 8," said one woman who gave her surname as Chen. "I beg the government to do something to help them."

Cishan itself is without water supply and many surrounding communities remain cut off because floodwaters have washed out roads. On the outskirts of the town, soldiers were helping local residents dig the mud from their homes and businesses.