집중호우 일주일간 이재민 2천5백명 달해 ... 이르면 오늘 특별재난지역선포
Torrential rain has been wreaking havoc on South Korea for days now,... causing numerous deaths and widespread damage to property and infrastructure.
Thousands of homes have been damaged by floods and thousands of people have had to evacuate.
Eum Ji-young has our top story.
The damage is mounting up due to the heavy downpours that have slammed South Korea, especially Seoul and the central region.
According to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters as of six AM on Friday, 17 people have died since the start of August and 10 are unaccounted for.
This does not include the one death and 5 people still missing after a private inflatable boat and a patrol boat capsized Thursday as they attempted to rescue crew on a police boat at a dam in Gangwon-do Province.
South Korea's Prime Minister offered his condolences to the victims and the families and urged the authorities to do all they can.
"I visited the scene and it was very sad. The accident occurred because of a judgement that's hard to understand because water was being released from the dam."
Around two-thousand five-hundred people have suffered damage to their homes over the last 7 days.
Also, more than 47-hundred people have been temporarily evacuated and roughly 500 are staying with family or friends.
More than 61-hundred public and private facilities in South Korea have been destroyed mainly due to flooding and landslides.
More than 19-hundred houses have been flooded, 81-hundred hectares of farmland inundated and around one thousand roads and bridges damaged.
Major highways nationwide have been partly closed, including sections of the Olympic Expressway and Gangbyeon Northern Highway in Seoul and others in Gyeonggi-do and Chungcheongbuk-do Provinces.
The South Korean government is looking to declare "Special Disaster Zones" in the most severely damaged areas some time on Friday in response to the flood damage.
Eum Ji-young, Arirang News.
