A tropical storm has left 69 people dead in China, reports said on Thursday, after it lashed Taiwan with typhoon-grade winds and rain.
Super Typhoon Nepartak brought chaos to Taiwan last week, forcing more than 15,000 people to flee their homes as part of the nation saw its strongest winds in more than a century.
It had weakened to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in China’s Fujian Province on Saturday last week, but still wreaked havoc, with pictures showing cars upended, buildings ripped apart and towns left wallowing in a thick sludge of brown mud.
By Thursday, more than half a million people had been forced to evacuate and about 8,300 homes had been destroyed, Xinhua news agency reported.
Later in the day, Xinhua said that 69 people in Fujian had been killed, up from an earlier toll of 21, with six missing.
Direct economic losses had reached 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion), Xinhua said, adding that the storm had destroyed 19,510 hectares of crops and forced 233 factories to suspend production.
Nepartak killed three people in Taiwan and injured more than 300, according to the Central Emergency Operations Center.
Xinhua said in a separate report that in incidents not necessarily related to the storm, floods across China had left 237 dead and 93 missing as of Wednesday.
It did not specify the time period within which the fatalities occurred.
Flooding is common during the summer monsoon season in southern China, but rainfall has been particularly heavy this year and many areas have been lashed by torrential rains.
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