The Rains Came

In Asia the heavens opened, the earth rumbled, and millions suffered under the pestilences of a hard season.

Formosa. When Clerk Tsai Yung-ting awoke at 2 a.m., the rain had been falling for hours on the sleeping coastal village of Houlung. Too late, he rushed down to the sea wall--to find the dike watchmen asleep and the water pouring through. By the time he got back to rouse the sleeping village, the torrent was already waisthigh. That night Tsai and 29 others of Houlung's 100 people died.

Most of Formosa's 10 million population are clustered along the island's western coastal plains, in the shadow of mountain ranges from which streams fall precipitously and fan out through dike-guarded channels. The rains started first in the north. Later, in the central part of the island, a record 40 inches of rain fell onto the rocky hills, then raced down in torrents that carried tumbling rocks the size of pumpkins along with them to batter dikes on the plain below. Changhua, a city of 70,000 people, was inundated. At one village near by, 15 people, marooned on a knoll, saved themselves by clinging to the tails of water buffalo that swam to dry land.

Formosan troops worked desperately to rescue tens of thousands trapped by the floods, and an American aircraft carrier rushed 20 helicopters over from Hong Kong to help save lives and distribute rice. As the waters receded, officials counted about 650 dead, 750 seriously injured, 750 people missing and a quarter million homeless--victims of Formosa's worst floods of the century.

Before flood workers could finish their job, an earthquake struck another part of the island, killing 16, leaving thousands homeless in southern Formosa.

Mainland China was having its own troubles with the elements. Peking reported that Honan province was suffering a cruel drought, while at the same time severe rains have flooded much of the Peking area in what the People's Daily calls "a disaster without precedent for some hundred years." Then, added the Chinese, swarms of locusts had moved into Honan, Shantung and Kiangsu provinces, stripping leaves from crops on thousands of acres of farmland.

Few details came out through the totalitarian screen of secrecy, and it was hard to tell how much of Red China's agricultural troubles were political, how much natural. But obviously, the disaster reports were one way to prepare Red China's 650 million for food shortages this winter. The 1959 crop yields are reported sharply below normal; the usual propaganda boasts of "record harvests in China's great leap forward" are notably missing this summer, and a People's Daily editorial growls that "an inclination to avoid hardship has found breeding ground among some cadres"--leading outside experts to suspect that many farm communes are failing to meet their quotas.

Japan. It was typhoon season again, and the latest, called Georgia, smashed into central Honshu 150 miles southwest of Tokyo, cutting diagonally across the island before disappearing into the Sea of Japan. Flood waters and landslides destroyed bridges, blocked roads, isolating many communities. At least 139 died, 107 were missing and 1,000 injured.

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