Search on after typhoon kills 115
BEIJING, China -- Rescue workers in China are searching for more victims after the death toll from Typhoon Rananim rose to 115.
The most powerful storm of the season had slammed into the country's southeastern coast, reportedly injuring more than 1,800 people.
Another 16 people were missing in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, where the storm roared ashore late Thursday with winds of more than 160 kph (100 mph), China Central Television said.
Residents of the province awoke on Saturday to power outages, uprooted trees and collapsed house, Reuters news agency reported.
Rananim -- it means "hello" in the Chuukese language spoken in Micronesia -- made landfall near the town of Wenling on Thursday night, bringing heavy rain and plunging the town into darkness, after killing one person in Taiwan.
"Shop signboards were flying out and hit people's arms and legs like knives," a doctor at the No.1 People's Hospital in Wenling told Reuters news agency.
"The wind was really very, very strong and we have rarely seen this."
Wenling is about 150 kilometers (90 miles) south of Shanghai.
Rananim weakened to a tropical storm as it moved west into inland Jiangxi province on Friday, bringing heavy rain to China's central lakes region.
Authorities reportedly evacuated 410,000 people from its path, many from rural villages where the official Xinhua News Agency said raging wind and rain destroyed huge swathes of cropland and killed thousands of livestock.
More than 42,000 houses were destroyed and tens of thousands more damaged, Xinhua said. More than 1,800 people were injured, it said.
Rananim was the most powerful typhoon to strike China since 1997, the newspaper Qianjiang Evening News said on its Web site.
Power in the major city of Taizhou was knocked out and millions of people lost water and phone service, news reports said.
The Shihmen Reservoir, Taiwan's biggest reservoir, opened its floodgates to let off excess water, and authorities urged residents downstream to evacuate when necessary.
On the mainland, high winds and torrential rains were expected as far as 250 kilometers (150 miles) away in the provinces of Fujian to the south and Anhui to the northwest, Xinhua said.
The storm is expected to help relieve a drought and heatwave affecting much of eastern China.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
