Taiwan authorities have launched a massive operation to find tens of thousands of people unaccounted for in the wake of floods and landslides triggered by Typhoon Morakot.
Large parts of the south of the island have been devastated, with roads, bridges and entire villages being washed away or buried in mud.
The government has confirmed 38 deaths but Al Jazeera's Steve Chao, reporting from the heart of rescue efforts in the south on Tuesday, said tens of thousands remain cut off and unaccounted for in the mountainous region, and hundreds are feared dead.
In the village of Hsiao Lin, between 400 and 600 people were feared to be buried in their homes after torrential rains caused a massive mudslide to envelop at least 200 homes, our correspondent said.
One Hsiao Lin survivor said from a temporary shelter in a neighboring town that "the mountain just collapsed on us".
"I live lower down and survived, but all my relatives were buried," he said.
Villagers were surprised by the typhoon as it had been forecast to track north but instead headed south to unprepared areas where it triggered the worst flooding seen in 50 years, our correspondent said.
Morakot has now weakened to a tropical storm but it is still wreaking havoc on China's southeastern coast, triggering a massive landslide in Zhejiang province that toppled six apartment buildings burying an unknown number of residents late on Monday.
Buildings destroyed
China's state-run Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday that the landslide in Pengxi town destroyed six four-storey buildings at the foot of a mountain at 10:30pm local time on Monday.
Six survivors were pulled out - one in critical condition - but rescuers did not yet know how many people were buried under the rubble and search operations were hampered by the amount of mud and rock.
The storm also sparked the evacuation of about 1.4 million people from Zhejiang and neighboring coastal province Fujian, Chinese authorities said.
Al Jazeera's China correspondent, Tony Cheng, said many areas had been evacuated but many people were still in the storm's path and since the buildings collapsed at a late hour when people would have likely been home, casualty figures were bound to rise.
Many of the areas affected by heavy rains are mountainous and building standards are not known to be very high there, leaving many vulnerable to landslides, our correspondent said.
Francis Markus, a spokesman for the International Red Cross Federation and the Red Crescent Society in China, told Al Jazeera from Beijing that things were "still very much on edge".
He said residents who had evacuated from the area were looking for the weather and terrain to stabilize before making their way back home.
PHOTO CAPTION
Debris and floodwater surrounds buildings and a destroyed section of road in Taimali, in southeast Taiwan's Taitung county.
Al-Jazeera