Five dead, millions without power as typhoon lashes Japan
Powerful Typhoon Songda battered Japan and South Korea today, killing five people and injuring almost 300, cutting power to millions and grounding nearly 400 flights.
The storm hampered coast guards in western Japan in their search for 18 missing Russian seamen whose ship went down, and in their attempt to rescue 22 Indonesian seafarers.
Songda, the seventh typhoon to strike Japan this season, hit the southern islands of Kyushu and Okinawa with winds of up to 144 kilometres per hour, the meteorological agency said.
Across western regions of Japan, 268 people were injured, according to the Japan Broadcasting Corp public television.
In Yamaguchi prefecture near Kyushu, an 80-year-old farmer died in hospital after falling in the storm and sustaining head injuries.
A 62-year-old man died in hospital after he was buried under a landslide in Kagoshima prefecture.
In the Kyushu region, more than 1 million homes were without power at the peak of the storm.
Media reports said nearly 400 domestic and international flights to and from Kyushu had been cancelled by early today.
In the Chugoku region just east of Kyushu, almost 449,000 homes and offices suffered a power outage.
All 18 Russian crew aboard the Cambodian-flagged freighter Blue Ocean were missing after the ship sank in the port of Mokuzai in Hiroshima prefecture as the typhoon pounded the area, the coast guard said.
"We are still searching for the crew members. We have an unconfirmed report that six of the 18 crew members were rescued but we cannot confirm the information," a coast guard official said.
"Our efforts to search the ship and the crew have been hampered by the strong typhoon."
Off Yamaguchi prefecture to the west, the coast guard was struggling to rescue 22 Indonesian seamen aboard a Indonesian freighter.
The ship issued a distress signal after running aground but the rescue was hampered by the severe weather.
"We found three bodies on the shore nearby. We haven't confirmed their identification but they appear to be South-East Asian nationals," another coast guard official said.
"We observed a part of the ship still above the surface of the sea. We still don't know if the remaining crew are still alive inside the ship."
Songda brought torrential rain and strong gusts to the Kyushu region as it landed near Nagasaki City on this morning.
A meteorological agency official said it was moving north-east along the Sea of Japan coastline at 65 kilometres per hour.
He described it as "very big and strong", bringing heavy rain, high waves and floods.
The agency has issued weather warnings for nearly all of south-west Japan.
In the Kyushu region alone, more than 36,000 people were evacuated from their homes and taken to shelter in school gyms and public facilities.
In South Korea heavy rains were lashing the southern provinces as the typhoon skirted the country's largest island of Jeju.
--AFP
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