Special Report: Saomai lands in China
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Motorcycles are overthrown by strong wind on a street in Fuding, a city in southeast China's Fujian Province, Aug. 10, 2006. Typhoon Saomai, the eighth to hit China this year, landed in neighboring Zhejiang Province late Thursday.(Xinhua Photo)
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HANGZHOU, Aug. 11 (Xinhua)-- Typhoon Saomai, the strongest storm to hit the Chinese mainland in 50 years, has left at least 98 people dead and 149 missing in east China, according to local government sources.
Eighty-one of the dead and 11 of the missing were in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, where 2.1 million people were affected and 18,000 houses were destroyed, said the civil affairs bureau of Wenzhou on Friday.
Seventeen of the dead and 138 of the missing were in Fujian Province, said the flood control office of Fujian. More
Saomai, the eighth typhoon to hit China, landed in Cangnan County of Wenzhou city at 5:25 p.m. Thursday with wind speeds of up to 244 km per hour, bringing torrential rains and strong winds.
Saomai is the most powerful typhoon to hit the Chinese mainland since Aug. 1, 1956 when a typhoon made a landfall in Zhejiang with winds of up to 234 km per hour, leaving 4,900 dead and 15,000 injured in the province.
In Jinxiang Town of Cangnan, the bodies of 43 people, including eight children, have been retrieved from the rubble of collapsed houses, where they had sought shelter from rains and high winds.
Losses exceeded 4.5 billion yuan (562 million U.S. dollars) in Wenzhou.
Emergency relief materials worth 500,000 yuan (62,500 U.S. dollars), including quilts and medicine, were sent on Friday to Cangnan from Hangzhou, the provincial capital, said the provincial Red Cross Society.
Typhoon Saomai slammed Fujian soon after it made landfall. It lashed Fuding with winds of up to 270 km per hour, according to the provincial flood control headquarters.
"It is the strongest typhoon that we have ever seen," said an official with the Fuding flood control office, adding that the scenes were really terrible. Houses of the headquarters were seriously damaged with all glasses of the buildings lashed into pieces. Rainfall in Fuding exceeded 300 mm in 12 hours.
More than 10,000 houses were destroyed and 80,000 others were damaged in Fuding, said the official. Power was largely cut off inFuding, Xiapu, Zherong, Fu'an and Ningde.
Twelve people in two vessels from Taiwan Province and a fishing boat from Fujian have been rescued by local maritime workers, saidthe provincial flood control office. They had been reported missing after failing to anchor in Fuding because of high winds.
The provincial government has allocated 2 million yuan (250,000U.S. dollars) in cash and a batch of disaster relief materials, including 1,500 tens, 3,000 quilts and 50,000 pieces of clothes toSaomai-hit areas.
About one million in Zhejiang and 620,000 in Fujian were evacuated to safe areas ahead of Saomai. More than 30,000 vessels returned to harbor in Zhejiang.
Typhoon Saomai had weakened into a tropical depression by 9 a.m. Friday. Its center was over Yingtan City, Jiangxi Province, at 10 a.m. and it was continuing to lose force, said the provincial meteorological observatory.
East China's Anhui Province has started an emergency plan to combat Saomai as rainstorms and strong winds were forecast in its south.
Three other storms this year, Bilis, Kaemi and Prapiroon, caused floods, mud flows and landslides in east and southern China,leaving at least 752 dead and 280 missing.
Natural disasters had killed 1,699 people in China and left 415 missing this year, the Red Cross Society of China said on Thursday. Enditem
as seen from spaceCategory 5
Super  made landfall in the eastern province  in China around 5:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon. By Friday evening Saomai had left a path of destruction in Zhejiang and neighboring province . Over 100 people have been reported dead with even more missing. An estimated 3.5 million people were affected by the storm, some 1.6 million of whom were evacuated.

Reports from the civil affairs bureau tell of large-scale material destruction. In Zhejiang, 18,000 houses were destroyed and in Fujian, 32,000. Hundreds of thousands of buildings have been damaged. Phone and power lines were knocked down and outages were wide-spread.

With wind speeds of 216 km/h (135 mph) at the time of landfall it is the strongest typhoon to hit China since August 1, 1956, when a storm with wind speeds of 244 km/h killed 4,900 people.

Emergency plans have been implemented and supplies are being sent in from other provinces. The central government has allocated 166 million yuan to assist the affected region.