A powerful typhoon has battered Taiwan with strong winds and torrential rain, killing four people and cutting power to over 3.5 million households.
By mid-day local time, as the eye of Typhoon Soudelor passed Taiwan, four people were also missing and 101 injured and hundreds of flights delayed or cancelled, authorities said.
More than 9,900 people have been evacuated.
The storm made landfall early in the morning on the island's east-coast counties of Yilan and Hualien, bringing up to 1,000mm (39 inches) of rain in mountainous northeastern areas and wind gusting up to 200 kph (124 mph).
Among the dead was one person who drowned in his flooded home and another who was killed by a falling tree.
Earlier, authorities said one adult and one child had drowned at sea, while a foreign worker was killed by a falling sign and a rescue worker was hit by a car and killed while clearing downed branches from a road.
As the storm approached over the Pacific Ocean yesterday, a child and an adult were killed in rough seas off the coast of Yilan.
In the capital, Taipei, large steel sheets and rods were blown off a half-constructed stadium and city authorities shut down a growing number of bus and subway services.
Authorities issued flood and mudslide alerts and television showed a fallen wind turbine, mudslides trapping people, and flood nearly covering the roofs of cars in some areas.
More rain and wind has been forecast for tonight and Sunday.
Taiwan Power, the island's main power company, said 3.62 million households had lost power. While some supplies had been restored, two million households were still without power, the company said.
Authorities began evacuating people as the storm approached and the island's military put tens of thousands of troops and thousands of vehicles on stand-by for rescue operations.
The Tropical Storm Risk website said the typhoon was a category 2 storm, on a scale of 1 to 5, and could weaken to a category 1 as it leaves Taiwan.
Soudelor has drawn comparisons with 2009's Typhoon Morakot, which cut a wide path of destruction over southern Taiwan, leaving about 700 people dead or missing and causing $3 billion worth of damage.
Soudelor is expected to cross the Taiwan Strait and hit the Chinese province of Fujian late tonight. Authorities there have evacuated people on the coast.
Typhoons are common at this time of year in the South China Sea and Pacific, picking up strength from warm waters before losing strength over land.
