SHANGHAI - The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit China in half a century jumped to 436, with confirmation of 106 more deaths in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.
The agency did not elaborate on the sudden rise in the official toll caused by Saomai, but said many of the newly recorded victims were killed by house collapses in pouring rain and strong winds. Saomai struck China's southeast coast on Thursday last week.
Residents of the area have complained that the death toll was greatly understated, but Chinese officials have denied there was any cover-up.
"Local officials don't have to lie about death tolls from natural disasters as they don't bring them liabilities like coal mine accidents do," Xinhua quoted Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief chief under China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, as saying on Thursday.
Saomai, graded a "super typhoon" with winds exceeding 216 km (134 miles) per hour, affected over 2.5 million people in Zhejiang alone, destroying 39,000 houses and causing economic losses of 12.7 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion), Xinhua said.
Hardest hit was the coastal town of Shacheng in Fujian province, where about 1,000 of the more than 10,000 ships which returned to harbour before Saomai's arrival capsized and hundreds of fishermen died or went missing.
A total of 186 bodies had been recovered from waters off Shacheng and dozens were still missing by Thursday, Xinhua said on Friday.
Cai Meisheng, vice mayor of Fuding in Fujian, was quoted as saying the recovery of bodies could become more difficult as some may be trapped in 491 sunken vessels or entwined in fishing nets.
Angry Fujian residents claimed the death toll could be as high as 1,000 and accused the government of failing to offer adequate warning before the typhoon struck, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported.
Afraid of punishment from superiors, local officials in China have a record of covering up or underplaying bad news on disasters, accidents and epidemics.
But Wang noted China had declassified natural disaster death tolls as state secrets last year and cited other "institutional checks" against cover-ups, Xinhua said.
"And given the supervision from relatives of the victims, residents and media, it is also impossible to cover up," Wang was quoted as saying. "Covering up would be even a graver mistake."
He said poor communications and a growing migrant population hampered an accurate account of disaster casualties.
Much of south China has been repeatedly battered by typhoons and tropical storms this year, with nearly 1,000 killed by rainstorms, landslides and other disasters that they brought even before Saomai hit.
Local officials in a county in the central province of Hunan, where almost 200 people died in floods triggered by tropical storm Bilis last month, were accused of initially understating that death toll by several times.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
