Police: 400 unaccounted for in Taiwan mudslide

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A mudslide touched off by a deadly typhoon buried a remote mountain village, leaving at least 400 people unaccounted for Monday, and military rescue helicopters unable to land because of the slippery ground dropped food to desperate survivors.

Typhoon Morakot struck Taiwan over the weekend with as much as 80 inches of rain, inflicting the worst flooding the island has seen in at least a half-century.

The storm submerged large swaths of farmland in chocolate-brown muck and swamped city streets before crossing the 112-mile-wide Taiwan Strait and hitting China, where it forced the evacuation of nearly 1 million people.

A disaster appeared to be unfolding around the isolated southern village of Shiao Lin, which was hit by a mudslide at about 6 a.m. local time Sunday -- while many people were still asleep -- and was cut off by land from the outside world.

A Taiwanese police official who identified himself only by his surname, Wang, said 400 people were unaccounted for in the village. Wang said 100 people had been rescued or otherwise avoided the brunt of the disaster.

Elsewhere in Taiwan, an additional 54 people were listed as missing.

Authorities put the confirmed death toll in Taiwan at 14, but that seemed certain to rise.

The typhoon's most destructive effects were in the heavily agricultural south and along the island's densely foliated mountain spine.

Shiao Lin is on Taiwan's southwestern coast.

In rural Pingtung county, the rains turned rich swaths of farmland so sodden that it was difficult to distinguish them from the open sea. In the Pingtung community of Sandimen, troops maneuvered armored personnel carriers through flooded streets, plucking whole families from water-logged buildings and ferrying them to safety.

In Taitung, in the southeastern lowlands, a raging flood toppled a five-story hotel.

Anxious relatives in Taitung county begged President Ma Ying-jeou to help their loved ones.

"You must try to save my father," cried one. "Please, I beg you to save my father."

After pummeling Taiwan, Morakot slammed into China's Fujian province, directly across the strait, with heavy rain and winds of 74 miles per hour, according the China Meteorological Administration. At least one child died after a house collapsed in Zhejiang province.

Hundreds of villages and towns were flooded and more than 2,000 houses had collapsed, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Four people died in Zhejiang, and two other deaths were reported in Fujian and Jiangxi province, Xinhua said.

Before plowing into Taiwan, the storm hit the Philippines, where it killed 22.

In Japan, meanwhile, Typhoon Etau slammed into the western coast Monday. Twelve people were killed in raging floodwaters and landslides, and 10 others were missing, police said.