Barely Surviving Buried in Mud... Helpless Against '450mm Water Bomb'

[Anchor]

Heavy downpours exceeding 450mm battered areas near Geoje, including Tongyeong and Busan, today (August 17). A landslide on an island in Tongyeong also left a resident in their 60s trapped before being rescued.

Reporter Kim Minjun has the details from the southern coast, which suffered damage comparable to Geoje.

[Reporter]

A person can be seen barely lying prone amidst a pile of mud, wrapped in a blanket and holding onto a bucket.

This is the footage of the Coast Guard rescuing resident A, a woman in her 60s who was buried in a landslide on Gonri-do island in Tongyeong, Gyeongsangnam-do, at around 5:00 AM today.

The rescue operation lasted for nearly an hour and a half, and resident A was transported to a nearby hospital with injuries including a leg fracture and hypothermia.

At the time, torrents of rain were pouring down in Tongyeong at a rate of 51.3mm per hour.

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Roads in various places were paralyzed by the heavy rain that poured overnight.

Citizens got out of their cars in the rain to clear fallen trees blocking the road themselves.

[Tongyeong Citizen : It was hard to make a U-turn over there because the tree was too big. A landslide kind of happened further back, too.]

A truck is stuck in a pothole created as asphalt roads cracked and caved in from rainwater surging fiercely like a river.

Traffic on the Daejeon-bound lanes of the Tongyeong Toll Gate on the Tongyeong-Daejeon Expressway was temporarily restricted in the afternoon as crews cleared mud and debris that had collapsed onto the road.

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Heavy rain damage continued in Busan and Jeju as well. Commercial banners and signs fell in the Deokcheon-dong area of Busan, and a boulder weighing about 1 ton washed down by rainwater blocked a road in Gupyeong-dong, causing traffic disruptions.

Drainage operations to pump water out of flooded homes continued all night in areas of Seogwipo and Jeju City in Jeju.

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As of 6:00 PM, the amount of rainfall recorded today along the southern coast was 453.7mm in Tongyeong, 105mm in Busan, 103mm in Jinju, and 88mm in Changwon.

Over 140 roads and bridges were temporarily restricted in Sacheon, Goseong, and Tongyeong, and 40 residents from 22 households evacuated.

(Video by Park Na-young | Photo courtesy of Tongyeong Coast Guard, Gyeongnam Fire Service, Busan Fire Service, and Jeju Fire Service)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.