- SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea
said Monday the most powerful typhoon to hit the country caused at least
$1 billion in damage and killed at least 89 people when it carved a path
of destruction through vital industrial areas.
-
- Rescue workers were hunting for 26 people still missing
three days after Typhoon Maemi howled into the country on Friday with 215-kph
winds (134-mph) in the middle of the five-day "Chusok" thanksgiving
holiday.
-
- The typhoon crumpled giant container cranes, heaved an
evacuated ocean liner onto a beach, sank scores of vessels and plunged
more than a million homes into darkness in the southeast industrial heartland.
-
- Thousands of homes were still without electricity on
Monday.
-
- "Rescue and repair work is going on round the clock
with soldiers, police personnel and others helping residents," Seo
Jung-pyo, an official at the National Disaster Prevention and Countermeasures
Headquarters, told Reuters.
-
- The government is allocating more than $1 billion in
disaster relief and early estimates of the damage are running to at least
$1 billion.
-
- Financial markets delivered a grim verdict on the cost
to Asia's fourth-largest economy, which entered its first recession since
the 1997-98 financial crisis in the second quarter.
-
- The stock market fell one percent by midday, with top
exporters and shipbuilders leading the way, but contractors and cement
producers shot up as investors expected rebuilding work to boost their
business.
-
- The won currency lost ground but government bond prices
surged because investors favored fixed assets over stocks amid uncertainty
over the U.S. economy and over the domestic one now it had been hit by
a typhoon.
-
- The government was scrambling to assess whether the typhoon
could hurt growth prospects for the third quarter and the year.
-
- PUSAN PORT NEAR NORMAL
-
- The government said it would allocate 1.4 trillion won
in disaster relief. State banks offered soft loan packages to help people
and companies.
-
- Seo at the anti-disaster office said the cost of damage,
put at 1.25 trillion won ($1.07 billion) as of early Monday, could rise.
-
- Most of the deaths were from electrocution, landslides
and drowning. The capital, Seoul, in the north of the country, was unaffected.
-
- Typhoon Maemi, or "cicada" in Korean, dumped
up to 453 mm (18 inches) of rain in some areas, triggering floods that
forced 25,000 people to evacuate their homes, before heading out to sea
some seven hours later.
-
- Typhoons often strike South Korea at this time of year.
The country's worst storm, Typhoon Sara, killed 849 people in 1959.
-
- The typhoon mauled the main port of Pusan, one of Asia's
busiest. The port was operating at about 80 percent capacity on Monday.
-
- Some rice paddies and vegetable and fruit areas were
flooded but later drained. South Korea, which is trying to slash a rice
surplus and cut output, did not expect a major impact on prices or imports.
-
- ($1=1170.0 won) (Additional reporting by Kim Miyoung,
Rhee So-eui, Park Sung-woo and Lee Shin-hyung)
|
