China typhoon death toll rises to 114

China’s death toll from Typhoon Saomai rose to 114 today as authorities said some victims were evacuees who died when buildings used as shelters collapsed in the strongest storm to hit China in more than five decades.

More rain fell today in inland areas, where the weakened storm was moving westward as residents of the south east coast cleared away the debris of wrecked houses.

The death toll rose after rescuers found eight more bodies in Fuding, a coastal city in Fujian province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said 183 people were still missing.

In the inland province of Jiangxi, an elderly couple were swept away on Friday as they checked their farmland during the storm, Xinhua said. It said one member of the couple was dead and the other missing.

Much of the area is still recovering from Tropical Storm Bilis, which killed more than 600 people last month.

Hardest-hit by Saomai was the coastal city of Wenzhou, where at least 81 people were killed after the storm hit late Thursday with winds up to 170 mph, reportedly destroying more than 50,000 houses, sinking more than 1,000 fishing boats and blacking out six cities.

Cangnan County on Wenzhou’s outskirts suffered 43 deaths, some of them in the collapse of two to four-storey residential buildings of reinforced concrete that were thought to be safe in high wind, said a spokesman for the Communist Party committee.

The county evacuated 100,000 people ahead of the storm, said the spokesman.

“Some people were killed because after they moved to friends’ or relatives’ homes, those homes collapsed,” Huang said. “Other people were killed during the evacuation because billboards, trees or power poles fell on them.”

Total economic losses in Zhejiang and Fujian were estimated at 11.3bn yuan (€111.42m), the China Daily newspaper reported on its website.

Rescue workers were handing out cooking oil, sacks of rice, clothes and bedding to thousands of people living in shelters in coastal Zhejiang and Fujian provinces.

Local authorities were helping to disinfect drinking water, as well as areas with standing water to prevent disease, China Central Television said.

Bulldozers ploughed through piles of wreckage and mud, pushing aside twists of metal and chunks of concrete.

Elsewhere in Zhejiang, a landslide killed six people in the city of Lishui, Xinhua said. Seven people were reported killed in Fujian, while Jiangxi suffered one death in its capital city, Nanchang.

Yesterday a flash flood triggered by heavy rains in north China killed at least seven people, including a one-year-old child, Xinhua said.

The flood occurred on Friday in the town of Balgutai in the Inner Mongolia region, where some 1,000 residents were relocated to safety, it said.

Saomai, the Vietnamese name for the planet Venus, was the eighth major storm to hit China during an unusually violent typhoon season.

It killed at least two people in the Philippines earlier and dumped rain on Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The weather bureau said Saomai was the most powerful typhoon since its record-keeping began in 1949.

In 1956, a typhoon with winds up to 145 mph killed 4,900 people in Zhejiang.