Storm Soaks China, 5 Million Affected

A storm drenched China's southeast on Sunday after killing five people on Taiwan and prompting the evacuation of 1.4 million people on the mainland, officials said. In Vietnam, the death toll from a separate storm rose to 55.

Krosa came ashore as a typhoon in China's Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, but weakened and was soon downgraded to a tropical storm, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

There were no reports of deaths or injuries attributed to Krosa in China, but it affected 5.38 million people in about 650 towns in Zhejiang province, Xinhua said. About 1.4 million people were evacuated from coastal areas as a precaution.

It quoted the provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters as saying Monday that Krosa - the Cambodian word for crane - had caused economic loses of $610 million.

"The storm paralyzed transportation services, cut off power supplies, suspended schooling and tourist businesses in some areas," Xinhua said.

Krosa killed five people Saturday on Taiwan as it knocked out power to 2 million homes and soaked the island, according to Taiwan's Disaster Relief Center.

Two men were killed in suburban Taipei when a landslide buried their house, the center said. A man died after falling from his balcony in Hsinchu and a woman was electrocuted after falling from her motorcycle in Tainan. A man's body was also recovered from a hostel that was hit by a landslide in Ilan and another man was missing.

Early Sunday, China's coast guard rescued 27 sailors from a Hong Kong freighter that suffered mechanical failure after it was hit by the storm off Wenzhou, Xinhua said.

In Shanghai, where the Special Olympics is taking place, the city government canceled vacations for flood-control workers and was drafting plans to drain competition sites, the agency said.

Meanwhile, the death toll from Typhoon Lekima, which hit Vietnam's central coast late Wednesday, rose to 61, with another 15 people missing, officials said Monday.

The death toll in Vietnam's worst-hit central province of Nghe An rose to 22 after eight more bodies were discovered over the past two days, said provincial disaster official Pham Hong Thuong.

"Communication to many parts of the province is still cut off," Thuong said. "The death toll is likely to rise."

Lekima, named after a local fruit, also damaged about 77,000 homes, the government said.