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S Korea mops up after worst-ever typhoon blows out

Thousands of soldiers searched for bodies, cleared roads and distributed relief supplies yesterday as the death toll climbed to 84 from South Korea's most powerful typhoon in at least a century. At least 25 people remained missing and were feared dead.

Helicopters ferried relief supplies to flooded towns and villages in the southeastern part of South Korea, which was mauled by Typhoon Maemi on Friday night.

"Although some functions have been paralyzed, let's try to set a new record in normalizing the distribution of goods," President Roh Moo-hyun said after touring Busan, the country's second largest city and worst-hit urban area.

Packing record winds of 216km per hour, the typhoon was so powerful that it lifted shipping containers in the air, toppled gigantic cranes and flipped an evacuated cruise ship on its side in Busan.

The National Disaster Prevention and Countermeasures Headquarters said 84 people were confirmed dead nationwide and 25 were listed as missing and feared dead. Yonhap news agency said the toll could rise to 120.

The typhoon left South Korea on Saturday and had dissipated in the Sea of Japan by yesterday. Seoul, the capital, was unaffected.

The government released 1.4 trillion won (US$1.2 billion) for relief and recovery work across the country, the disaster headquarters said.

Of about 25,000 people who fled their homes to seek shelter, about 7,000 remained in schools and public facilities yesterday, their homes still uninhabitable, it said.

More than 5,600 soldiers were involved in the recovery work, it said. Civil authorities armed with bulldozers cleared broken highways of rubble dumped by landslides. Residents armed with shovels cleared sludge from their homes and streets.

Maemi -- Korean for cicada -- dumped up to 450mm of rain and was the most powerful typhoon since Korea began keeping records in 1904, topping the 210kph wind speed record set by Typhoon Prapiroon in 2000.

Maemi also hit several parts of North Korea with strong winds and rainfall of up to 186mm, Yonhap said. But the extent of damage was not known because North Korea's Stalinist government tightly controls information.

In Busan, the country's main port, 11 container-lifting cranes were toppled, their green and red steel limbs twisted beyond recognition. Steel containers as long as 6m were scattered around the port. An offshore storage facility for Exxon Mobil Corp plowed into an oil tanker being built by Hyundai Mipo Dockyard for a German company. Both were damaged.

A cruise ship-turned-floating hotel that had been evacuated earlier flipped over. At least 82 empty fishing boats and other vessels capsized. Seaside shops were shredded, and overturned cars floated in flooded streets.

Five of the nation's 18 nuclear power plants were shut after their main current transformers or power lines were damaged by the typhoon, but no radiation leakage was reported.

Thirty-four major factories in Ulsan and Onsan on the southeast coast, including two major oil refineries, were forced to temporarily halt operations, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said.

The disaster office said 8,510 hectares of farmland were flooded ahead of the fall harvest season.
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