Reports coming out of North Korea say heavy rainfall has caused dozens of human casualties, destroyed homes and flooded farmland, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. According to AP, a dipstach from North Korea's Korean Central News Agency cited "40 human casualties" without elaborating. Similar reports on past damaging rains indicate the figure is the number of dead.
KCNA reported that flooding destroyed 1,070 houses and 99 public buildings such as schools and hospitals. The dispatch also said more than 300 acres of farmland have been flooded.
The heavy rains occurred as the remnants of Typhoon Goni passed by the Korean Peninsula overnight Tuesday. North Korea often suffers heavy damages from summer rains due to poor drainage, deforestation and dilapidated infrastructure.
Southwestern Japan took Typhoon Goni's best shot on Tuesday, as the storm damaged buildings, flooded streets and triggered landslides.
Goni made landfall in Japan about 6 a.m. local time Tuesday morning, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. The BBC said authorities ordered evacuations for more than 600,000 residents due to the threats from mudslides and flooding.
At least 70 people were injured in Japan, and one person is missing, BBC added.
The JMA issued a landslide warning for Fukuoka, the seventh-largest city in Japan with a population of about 1.5 million, shortly before 8 a.m. local time Tuesday morning. The warning said landslide danger was rising due to the heavy rainfall in the area. Several other municipalities in Fukuoka Prefecture, as well as parts of Saga and Ōita prefectures, were also under landslide warnings.
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More than 470,000 homes temporarily lost power on Japan's southernmost main island, Kyushu, Kyodo News reported. Flights to and from Kyushu were canceled, and bus service was halted.
One death has been attributed to high waves as the storm moved towards the mainland. According to NHK, a 66-year-old man drowned after falling from a fishing boat off of Miyazaki Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu on Monday.
Wind gusts of 159 mph, a local record, flipped over cars and toppled utility poles overnight on the remote Japanese island of Ishigaki, near Taiwan, Japanese media reported. A few people were cut by broken windows. The storm, with maximum sustained winds of 112 mph, was heading north toward Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu.
The Kyushu Electric Power Company said that more than 350,000 homes were without power just before the storm made landfall, mostly in Kagoshima Prefecture, where 26.4 percent of all customers have no service.
On the northern islands of the Philippines, Goni triggered mudslides and brought deadly damaging winds, killing at least 21 people and leaving 15 unaccounted for.
Landslides killed at least 13 people in the mountain province of Benguet, including four gold miners who were pulled out of a huge mudslide that buried three work camps. A dozen miners were missing and more than 100 policemen and fellow miners dug through the mud amid fading hope that survivors would be found, officials said.
Benguet Governor Nestor Fongwan said days of pounding rain and a swollen creek saturated a mountain slope, which cascaded down the gold-mining area at dawn Saturday. "They were sleeping when a huge chunk of the mountain came down and buried their work sites," he said by phone.
Six people died elsewhere in the north, and four others were missing, according to the Office of Civil Defense.
The 9-month old boy and his sister drowned after floods swept away their riverside shanty in Subic town in northwestern Zambales province early Monday. Their 5-year-old brother remains missing.
The typhoon damaged more than 1,000 houses, said Alexander Pama, head of the government's disaster-response agency.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
