6 August 2006Yahoo News!Peter Harmsen
Tropical storm Prapiroon swept across south China, leaving a trail of destruction with 77 people reported dead.
Prapiroon -- aptly named after the Thai god of rain -- had killed 51 in the densely populated province of Guangdong, as well as 26 in Guangxi region further west, the state Xinhua news agency said Sunday.
"It's still raining heavily and the situation is pretty serious," an official told AFP from the flood control headquarters in Guangxi region, where the eye of the storm was located Sunday.
Fourteen were missing in Guangdong, where the storm made landfall three days earlier, while two were unaccounted for in Guangxi, according to Xinhua.
A staggering 660,000 had to be evacuated to safe areas as the storm approached, bringing gales and torrential rain, the agency reported.
Tragedy struck in Luming, a hamlet in a mountainous part of Guangxi, when a landslide engulfed the home of a family of four and killed three of them, a local official said.
"Only one man survived," said Qin Jiexia, a spokeswoman for the flood control office in Heng county, where Luming is located. "He lost his wife, his daughter and his sister-in-law."
In Fenghuang township, also in Guangxi, at least six farmhands died early Saturday when a flood swept away the temporary shelter they had built for the night to stay dry, the state Xinhua news agency said.
Although Prapiroon had now been downgraded from a typhoon to a tropical storm, it continued to impact the lives of millions.
In Guangxi's Heng county, entire communities were paralyzed when flooded by water from the Yunbiao reservoir.
Large numbers of farm buildings had been inundated, forcing residents to take refuge on rooftops in hopes of eventually being evacuated, a Xinhua reporter on the scene said.
"The situation has improved a bit but we're still flooded," said Qin, the flood control office spokeswoman.
In Guangxi, one of China's most impoverished areas, rain had hit 5.1 million people or more than one in 10 of the region's inhabitants, Xinhua said.
A total of 9,300 houses had been toppled by landslides and floods, and crops covering 172,00 hectares (425,000 acres) had been destroyed, according to the agency.
Official media have seized on the opportunity to depict the armed forces as servants of the people, as has regularly happened in the past during natural disasters.
State television showed footage of soldiers rescuing mud-caked farmers trapped by floods or piling up sandbags to prevent rivers from overflowing.
Prapiroon was southern China's sixth typhoon of the season, which started more than a month earlier than usual with Typhoon Chanchu. It made landfall on May 18.
The worst was Bilis, which struck on July 14 and hovered over southern China for 10 days, killing at least 612 people.
In a summer of unusually violent storms and typhoons, China's unique cultural heritage was now also taking a beating, according to reports.
Xinhua said an ancient fortification, the only one of its kind in the southwestern province of Fujian, had collapsed after being pounded by torrential rain since May.
The round structure, built in the mid-17th century as a defense against Japanese pirates, had been a valuable source of information for historians, Xinhua said.
