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| Saturday, 28 August 2004 |
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Taiwan village wiped off the map in a few terrifying seconds TOCHANG,Friday (AFP) In less than 10 seconds the life of Chen Bi-chu was changed forever as a vast wall of mud smashed her flimsy house into pieces and buried her family. Chen and her younger son pulled themselves free from the pile of rocks and mud, but her older son was crushed to death by the crumbling house. Two days later her mother-in-law remains buried under the rubble. The stunned survivors of the landslide in a remote aborigine village in northern Taiwan consider themselves lucky. The accident on Wednesday, triggered by torrential rains brought by Typhoon Aere, wiped out their entire village and is believed to have killed at least 19 villagers. The rubble from the 20 destroyed houses in the small farming village of Tochang together with the river of mud and rocks left a pile five-storeys high. Rescuers have so far recovered eight bodies, but 11 villagers remained missing presumed dead. "It all happened in a split second and there was just no time to escape," Chen told AFP in Chupei, where she was treated in a hospital after being airlifted from the stricken village of Tochang. "It was like the whole mountain came crushing down and falling on our village," Chen recalled, her voice cracking. The 38-year-old farmer has bruises and cuts on her jaw and limbs while her teeth were nearly all smashed by falling rocks. Only around 20 of the 100 inhabitants of the village were home when disaster struck three days after Typhoon Aere, packing winds of 80 miles (130 kilometers) per hour, started dumping vast quantities of rain on the remote mountains. A total of 1,335 millimeters (53.4 inches) of rain fell on the area in three days, leading the government to issue a landslide warning to 80 towns across the island off the southeastern Chinese coast. The tragedy has led to heated debate over why the village was not evacuated before disaster struck. |
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