SEOUL, South Korea ? Thousands of rescuers used heavy machinery and shovels Thursday to clear mud and search for survivors after huge landslides and flooding killed at least 44 people in South Korea.
Five others were reported missing in the wake of the massive rains that have pounded Seoul and surrounding areas since Tuesday. It was the heaviest rainfall in South Korea this year.
Among the dead were 10 college students who were engulfed by a landslide while sleeping in a resort cabin in Chuncheon, north of Seoul. The students from Inha University in Incheon, just west of Seoul, were volunteering at a local elementary school.
Hundreds of firefighters and others rushed to rescue those believed trapped and pull the dead from the mud and wreckage in Chuncheon, but they stopped their rescue work on Wednesday evening after it became apparent no one else was missing. On Friday, about 970 workers were cleaning up the mud in the area, where 24 others were also injured and several buildings destroyed by the landslide, officials said.
At least 16 people died after mud crashed through homes at the foot of a mountain in southern Seoul. The National Emergency Management Agency reported 15 more deaths due to a stream flooding and landslides in towns near Seoul.
On Thursday, about 5,000 firefighters, soldiers, police officers and others mobilized to try to find any survivors and clean walls of mud piled in residential areas near Seoul's Womyeon Mountain, emergency official Kim Wu-min said.
About 7,500 others were working in Dongducheon, a city just north of Seoul, for a similar rescue and clean-up mission, he said.
Footage by YTN television network showed excavators removing a mass of mud and fallen tree parts and rescuers in raincoats shoveling up the dirt piled up near a Seoul apartment. Uniformed soldiers and firefighters wearing cotton gloves used their hands to pull out rocks and tree branches from the mud.
The rainfall left about 4,940 people homeless, flooded about 1,380 houses and caused power outage in 126,280 houses throughout South Korea, the National Emergency Management Agency said in a statement Thursday.
Fast-moving, muddy water filled the streets in Seoul on Wednesday, sending residents scrambling to the roofs of their partially submerged cars.
Water filled some subway stations and spewed from sewers. TV images showed people in one flooded subway station using shovels, brooms and a wooden board in an effort to keep more rain from coming in.
Footage showed officials rescuing hikers stranded on mountainsides. People plodded down streets covered with knee-deep water, many barefoot, their pants rolled up. In Seoul's center, cars were restricted from entering the lower part of a submerged two-level bridge.
About 17 inches (440 millimeters) of rain fell on Seoul and more than 13 inches (340 millimeters) on Chuncheon on Tuesday and Wednesday, about 15 times more than the average two-day rainfall at this time of year, according to the state-run Korea Meteorological Administration.
Rainfall stopped or decreased in many parts of Seoul and its surrounding areas on Thursday, but weather officials said South Korea would receive more rain until Friday morning.
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Associated Press writers Sam Kim and So Yeon Kwon contributed to this report.
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