TV footage showed waist deep yellow water flowing through the streets of the town of Wufeng, also in Nantou.
The town of Bailan in the north saw the heaviest rain, measuring 900 millimetres (35 inches) over the past two days, with winds gusting up to 220 kilometres per hour.
Streets were submerged under 30 centimetres of seawater in the port city of Keelung, the National Fire Agency said, with flooding also reported in the coastal area of Yilan and in New Taipei City, northwest of the capital.
Low lying houses along the Hsintien River through greater Taipei were flooded, including one village where residents had been evacuated Friday, a local police officer told AFP.
Local television showed roofs ripped from homes in northern Keelung and in Taipei, where 120 kilometre per hour winds and downpours disrupted power, uprooted trees and left the streets strewn with rubbish.
“I was very worried, I couldn’t sleep the whole night because the sound of the wind was so loud and my building was shaking almost like there was an earthquake,” Taipei resident Josephine Lin told AFP.
Across Taiwan, electricity supplies in nearly 800,000 homes cut off by the typhoon but half had been restored by Saturday morning, according to Taiwan Power Company.
Around 170 flights into and out of Taiwan were cancelled or delayed.
Hundreds of passengers on three international flights with Taiwan’s EVA Airways were trapped on their planes for six hours early Saturday, CTI cable news reported. The three aircraft departed later.
Offices and schools remained closed across Taiwan, with the public advised to stay indoors.
In August 2009, Typhoon Morakot killed about 600 people in Taiwan, most of them buried in huge landslides in the south, in one of the worst natural disasters to hit the island in recent years.
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