Typhoon pounds Japan, 8 dead, 28 seamen missing

Powerful typhoon Songda pounded southern Japan yesterday, killing at least eight people as it unleashed torrential rains and high winds, forcing evacuations, triggering blackouts and bringing transport almost to a halt.

Twenty-eight seamen from Russia and Indonesia were missing after their ship ran aground and another vessel sank in western Japan, coast guard officials said.

Police said a 62-year-old man died in a landslide in Kagoshima on the island of Kyushu, and an 80-year-old man died when he was knocked down by strong winds and struck his head on the ground in Yamaguchi on the main island of Honshu.

Songda, the region's third typhoon in three weeks, also damaged two vessels off South Korea's southern island of Cheju and Korean authorities issued a heightened typhoon alert for the south and east coasts of the country.

It injured 580 people in southern and western Japan and authorities urged more than 100,000 households in those regions to evacuate, Japanese public broadcaster NHK said, adding that Songda had cut off electricity to around 1.65 million households.

Twenty-two crew of an Indonesian cargo vessel were missing after the ship ran aground off Yamaguchi prefecture just north of the southernmost main island of Kyushu.

Coast guard officials said they had recovered three bodies drifting nearby but had yet to confirm they were crew.

A Cambodian-registered timber freighter sank after docking at a port in Hiroshima but the coast guard officials said 12 of its 18 crew, all from Russia, had been rescued but the rest remained unaccounted for. Officials said they had recovered two bodies but had yet to confirm they were members of the crew.

The typhoon unleashed winds of up to 216 km per hour in Hiroshima, the highest windspeed on record in the area, and brought heavy rains of 100 mm per hour to areas of nearby Yamaguchi prefecture, NHK said.

The fierce winds left scars on Itsukushima Shrine, damaging parts of the structure including the roof, Kyodo said.

The shrine, a World Heritage site, is partly built over water and is located on Miyajima, an island in Hiroshima prefecture.

The typhoon flipped a truck onto its side, blew tiles off roofs and caused a tanker under construction to run aground, television footage showed.

It caused widespread cancellations of transport services in Kyushu and nearby areas, including planes, trains and ferries.

Kyushu Railway Co., which carries an average of 810,000 passengers a day, stopped all its bullet trains and local trains in Kyushu.

More than 430 domestic flights, mostly going to and leaving from southwestern Japan, were cancelled, NHK said.