11 killed as typhoon slams China
Vietnam searching for 35 missing fishermen
Thursday, May 18, 2006; Posted: 3:43 p.m. EDT (19:43 GMT)
Typhoon Chanchu sinks a ship in the Philippines (:48)
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Manage Alerts | What Is This? SHANGHAI, China (Reuters) -- A typhoon slammed into south China on Thursday, killing 11 people and forcing the evacuation of more than one million, Xinhua news agency said, while Vietnam was still searching for 35 fishermen missing at sea.
Typhoon Chanchu, which brought heavy rain and winds up to 170 kilometer per hour (106 miles per hour), made landfall between the cities of Shantou and Xiamen in the early morning, the Hong Kong Observatory said.
China's coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian took the full brunt of the storm.
Eleven Chinese had died by Thursday afternoon and another four had gone missing, Xinhua said, quoting the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
It had said earlier that eight people, including two children, were killed in Guangdong's Shantou city, where Chanchu -- the strongest typhoon on record to enter the South China Sea in the month of May -- triggered house collapses and landslides.
Almost all roads in Shantou were flooded and there were several blackouts, Xinhua said, adding that downpours in Fujian had led to flooding in a number of rivers.
Air links, closed on Wednesday, were resumed and life was returning to normal in Shantou later on Thursday as the government officials started to tote up economic losses, it said.
State television news said Chanchu had been downgraded to a tropical depression and was heading northeast at a speed of 35 km (22 miles) per hour, but it would still bring strong rainfall to China's eastern provinces, including its financial hub, Shanghai.
In Vietnam, authorities re-established radio contact with six of 11 ships carrying more than 90 people that went missing on Wednesday some 160 nautical miles (300 km) south of China's Hainan island, then in Chanchu's path.
"Two more ships have sunk but the crews were safe, so we only have 35 people missing now," Huynh Chin, deputy head of the Red Cross Association in the central Vietnam province of Quang Ngai, told Reuters by telephone.
China's state television said a Chinese rescue vessel had saved 24 people on a Vietnamese ship on Thursday and also rescued an ore-carrying Belgian ship stranded offshore with eight crew members aboard.
Typhoons, drawing strength from warm water, roar into China from the South China Sea every year between May and September, losing power once they make landfall.
Xinhua said more than one million people in Guangdong and Fujian had been evacuated in the path of Chanchu, which killed at least 37 people when it swept across the Philippines last weekend.
The eye of the storm crossed China's coast halfway between Hong Kong and Taiwan, both often the victims of direct hits.
In Taiwan, rescuers winched to safety the crew of an oil tanker that had run aground off the coast of Kaoshiung after being hit by a large wave, television footage showed.
