집중호우 일주일간 이재민 2천5백명 달해 ... 이르면 오늘 특별재난지역선포<br /><br />Torrential rain has been wreaking havoc on South Korea for days now,... causing numerous deaths and widespread damage to property and infrastructure.<br />Thousands of homes have been damaged by floods and thousands of people have had to evacuate.<br />Eum Ji-young has our top story.<br />The damage is mounting up due to the heavy downpours that have slammed South Korea, especially Seoul and the central region.<br />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.<br />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.<br />South Korea's Prime Minister offered his condolences to the victims and the families and urged the authorities to do all they can.<br />"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."<br />Around two-thousand five-hundred people have suffered damage to their homes over the last 7 days.<br />Also, more than 47-hundred people have been temporarily evacuated and roughly 500 are staying with family or friends.<br />More than 61-hundred public and private facilities in South Korea have been destroyed mainly due to flooding and landslides.<br />More than 19-hundred houses have been flooded, 81-hundred hectares of farmland inundated and around one thousand roads and bridges damaged.<br />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.<br />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.<br />Eum Ji-young, Arirang News.<br />
