BEIJING - China has denied covering up casualties from natural disasters as
the official death toll from the strongest typhoon to strike the country in half
a century rose to 330, a number residents says is greatly understated.
Saomai, graded a "super typhoon" with winds exceeding 216 km (134 miles) per
hour, barrelled into China's southeast coast last Thursday, flattening tens of
thousands of houses, overturning ships and damaging infrastructure.
The hardest hit was the coastal town of Shacheng in
Fujian province, where about 1,000 of the more than 10,000 ships which returned harbour
before Saomai's arrival capsized and hundreds of fishermen died or went missing.
Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief chief under China's Ministry of Civil
Affairs, denied any attempts to cover up the scale of the damage.
"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
him as saying on Thursday.
China has the world's most dangerous coal-mining industry and local officials
have been accused of colluding with mine owners to conceal fatal accidents which
happen on an almost daily basis.
Wang cited China's declassification of natural disaster death tolls as state
secrets last year and 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 (death tolls)," 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.
The overall death toll for Fujian now stood at 241, bringing the total number
of people killed by Saomai in China to 330, Xinhua said.
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 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 the death toll by several times.