Rescue workers have stopped trying to dig out the village of Shiao Lin in Taiwan, with nearly 400 people feared buried by a mudslide caused by Typhoon Morakot, which dumped two metres of rain on the island in a short time. The government says a memorial service will be held on the spot where 170 homes were buried. More than 15,000 people have been rescued after being hit by the storm which provoked Taiwan’s worst floods in 50 years, but rescuers are still trying to reach another 1,900 people. The government has to date confirmed 116 people dead from the storm, not including Shiao Lin. In a strange twist, Taiwan’s media carry the story of what is alternately described as the about-face in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on foreign disaster aid or an administrative mistake that led to a government office initially telling other offices not to accept rescue assistance from abroad. BBC, China Post, Taipei Times
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 14 August 2009.
Filed under: World news
Tags: buried, disaster, floods, foreign aid, Hsiaolin, Morakot, mudslide, rescue work, Shiao Lin, Taiwan, typhoon, village
August 15th, 2009 at 6:34 am
A study by scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO), I think, determined that close to a million people die every year from the effects of global warming, from malaria to malnutrition, children in developing nations seemingly the most vulnerable. These numbers could almost double by 2020. Places where people have not experienced floods for a century or so, are now experiencing massive devastations. Who is to blame? What are we doing??