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August 27, 2012

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Taiwan warning that typhoon will return

TAIWAN residents were warned yesterday that Typhoon Tembin was likely to return as people struggled to clear mud-filled homes after the storm pounded the south of the island with the heaviest rains in more than a century.

The typhoon appeared to be heading back towards Pingtung County where people were still reeling from the flooding sparked by Tembin when it swept across the southern tip of the island on Friday.

Tembin weakened to a tropical storm after moving out to sea but it intensified into a typhoon again.

"Tembin regained strength and became a typhoon again early this morning. It was moving east-southeasterly," the weather bureau said yesterday.

Although the typhoon was still hundreds of kilometers from the island, the bureau predicted downpours in the south and southeast and called on people there to take precautions.

On its current track, Tembin was forecast to make landfall again in Pingtung tomorrow morning and move northward off the east coast.

"The clean-up has yet been finished even though we've kept working the past three days. And now I heard the typhoon is coming back," the owner of a shop in Hengchun township told the Sanli cable news network.

"This typhoon has destroyed much of my hard work over the past 20 years," he said, visibly upset, while other members of the family used mops to remove thick mud from the floor.

The storm's unusual movement was affected by Typhoon Bolaven which struck Japan's Okinawa yesterday, about 800 kilometers east of Taiwan.

Tembin forced more than 8,000 people to evacuate their homes when the torrential rain struck Pingtung. Weather bureau data indicated the county had received 724 millimeters of rain since last Wednesday, while Hengchun saw more than 600 millimeters of rainfall on Friday alone.

Damage to the agriculture sector totalled TW$168 million (US$5.6 million), according to the Council of Agriculture Affairs.

Last night, Tembin was around 400 kilometers southwest of the southern Kaohsiung City. With a radius of 180 kilometers, it was packing gusts of up to 126kph and moving east-southeast at 5kph.



 

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