Typhoon Rusa’s death toll rises to 113

Kim Do-gyun, Kangnung

Authorities said it would take a month to clean up after Typhoon Rusa unleashed winds of up to 127mph across South Korea’s east and south coasts, leaving a swathe of destruction before turning back to sea on Sunday.

Rescue workers in the eastern resort city of Kangnung, which bore the brunt of Rusa, toiled to reach cars buried under landslides as hopes of finding survivors faded and attention turned to providing water and food for hundreds of evacuees.

North Korea, where rainfall in some mountainous areas exceeded 27 inches, also reported scores of dead and many missing. Heavy showers and thunderstorms were forecast for the peninsula today as another storm, Typhoon Sinlaku, churned its way toward Okinawa and Taiwan.

South Korean ferry tours to the communist North and a North-South Red Cross meeting were postponed because of the disaster.

In the South, at least 16,000 people in remote villages had been cut off by landslides that buried and buckled roads, the National Disaster Prevention Headquarters said.

“Those who were buried by the landslide are all dead,” fireman Park Myung-sik, head of a rescue team in Kangnung, told Reuters.

“We expected that there would be no survivors ... but we tried anyway to dig out the buried cars and passengers in them,” he said.

Hampered by thick fog, troops joined the search for survivors after landslides and floods in coastal areas buried vehicles and destroyed 1,300 homes and other buildings. Workers used electronic sensors to search for survivors in the deep mud.

Kangnung, home to 230,000 people, was doused by a record 34 inches of rain on Saturday.

The government said on Monday the typhoon had affected 287,877 acres of farm land out of a total 4.67 million acres, flooding rice paddies and battering fruit and vegetable fields.

Typhoon Sinlaku, meanwhile, was expected to move across southern Japan late yesterday and today, bringing torrential rain, destructive wind and rough seas before heading for Taiwan.