Severe Tropical Storm Bailu yesterday brought heavy rain to eastern and southern Taiwan, with Hualien County recording more than 500mm, the Central Weather Bureau said.
Hualien’s Fuli Township (富里) saw the heaviest inundation in the nation with 534mm accumulated from midnight on Friday to 8pm yesterday, meeting the criteria for extreme torrential rain, the most severe of Taiwan’s four-tier rainfall intensity scale.
Two other monitoring stations in Fuli Township reported accumulated rainfall of 493.5mm and 484.5mm as of 8pm yesterday.
Photo provided by the Hualien County Fire Department via CNA
Extreme torrential rainfall means accumulated rainfall of 500mm or more in 24 hours, the bureau said.
It is followed by torrential rainfall, which means accumulated rainfall of between 350mm and 500mm in 24 hours, which occurred in many other parts of Hualien and Taitung counties and a mountainous area in Pingtung County, bureau data showed.
Two people in Taitung sustained minor injuries in the storm, although no details were immediately available.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA-EFE
Widespread flooding was also reported.
In Hualien, mudslides blocked roads in mountainous areas, in one case leaving 14 people trapped in a minivan.
About 2,400 people in Hualien, Pingtung, Kaohsiung and Tainan had been evacuated as a precaution.
On Provincial Highway No. 8, which cuts across central Taiwan through the Central Mountain Range, mudslides forced road closures between Tiansiang (天祥) and Dayuling (大禹嶺).
Whether to reopen the section of road today would depend on the extent of the damage, highway authorities said.
Similar closures took place in Kaohsiung on sections of Provincial Highways No. 20, 27 and 29, which were scheduled to reopen today at 8am.
After making landfall in Pingtung at 1pm yesterday, the eye of the storm left Taiwan and moved into the Taiwan Strait at 4:10pm, later than expected, bureau forecasters said.
As of 6pm, Bailu was 80km west-northwest of Kaohsiung, moving west-northwest at 24kph toward southeastern China, bureau data showed.
The storm had a radius of 150km and was packing maximum sustained winds (averaged over a 10-minute period) of 108kph, with gusts (sustained for one minute) of up to 126kph, the data showed.
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