A man stands near a military vehicle on a road filled with mud brought by flooding, after Super Typhoon Ragasa in Hualien, Taiwan, on September 24, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
At least 14 people were killed when a decades-old lake barrier burst in Taiwan, a government official said Wednesday (September 24, 2025), after Super Typhoon Ragasa pounded the island with torrential rain.
The barrier lake in eastern Hualien County burst Tuesday (September 23, 2025), washing away a bridge and sweeping into a town with a trail of thick sludge and mud.
“It was like a volcano erupting…. the muddy floodwaters came roaring straight into the first floor of my house,” Hsu Cheng-hsiung, 55, a neighbourhood leader of Kuang Fu township, told AFP.
Lee Kuan-ting, a Hualien County Government press official, said 14 people were killed and 18 injured.
The National Fire Agency said 124 people were missing.
“It was a disaster movie,” a local resident Yen Shau, 31, told AFP. He said an hour before the lake burst, many people were still at the local supermarket and grocery store. “Within minutes, the water had risen to halfway up the first floor,” he said.
He said he couldn’t sleep Tuesday (September 23, 2025) night for fear of another deluge from the lake, and on Wednesday (September 24, 2025) was shovelling mud from his home. “The mud was just too deep, too deep to dig out,” he added.
Footage released by the fire agency showed flooded streets, half-submerged cars and uprooted trees.
Across Taiwan, more than 7,600 people were evacuated due to Typhoon Ragasa.
Taiwan experiences frequent tropical storms from July to October.
Typhoon Danas, which hit the island in early July, killed two people and injured hundreds as the storm dumped more than 50 cm of rain across the south over a weekend.
Published – September 24, 2025 09:56 am IST
