“I wasn’t scared until I crawled out of the bus and then I got really scared,” said Wang Dazhi (王達志), 59, a Beijing native who had come to Taiwan for a holiday.
There was no way he could have known that a disaster on the Suhua Highway (蘇花公路) would almost take his life.
Heavy downpours began battering southern Yilan County at 10am on Thursday. Flash floods soon submerged Suao’s (蘇澳) downtown area, with its main streets turned into rivers.
PHOTO: CNA
As a result of the convergence of Typhoon Megi’s periphery and seasonal winds, Yilan County received record-level rainfall on Thursday, which also caused large-scale landslides along portions of the Suhua Highway.
A large number of travelers were stranded on sections of the highway, including Chinese tourists, such as Wang, who suffered a cut on his head after being hit.
Wang was flown by helicopter to Luodong Township’s (羅東) Boai Hospital, where he received 10 stitches.
PHOTO: CNA
Wang told reporters there were 23 people in his tour group, and they were on their way back from Hualien to Taipei when the landslide hit.
Wang said all he could remember was their tour group leader telling them to exit the bus. Wang, who was seated at the front of bus, tried to escape but was struck by something in the head in the ensuing chaos. Others were also injured.
Wang said after all the members of the group got off the bus, they were drenched, but then they met a driver who was driving an empty bus back to Taipei and who allowed them to take refuge in the bus.
PHOTO: CNA
Separately, a Chinese tour guide, who was leading a group of 16 people from Guizhou and Hubei provinces, told reporters that he and his group were scared when landslides hit their tour bus.
“We broke the windows to get out just before mudflows buried our bus,” said the tour guide, identified only by his family name, Fan (范).
Among the forces dispatched to rescue the stranded was an army squad of 19 soldiers led by Commander Tsai Kuo-ching (蔡國清).
Taking with them more than 200 different types of supplies and food, the squad left early yesterday. However, after driving for a while, they could not proceed further because the the road ahead of them had given way as a result of a landslide, Tsai said.
In heavy rain and darkness, Tsai said they took their flashlights and started walking down the highway by the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, they found a number of people in cars who had been trapped.
When asked by reporters how long they walked, soldier Liu Che-hong (劉哲宏) said that he did not have time to even look at his watch, but he estimated they walked for about five hours before stopping to take a rest.
He added that the food that they took along proved extremely useful because the majority of those trapped had not eaten since the night before.
The soldiers themselves did not eat, Liu said, but he added that “it is a soldier’s duty not to back down in the face of a disaster situation and that helping people is of utmost importance.”
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