HUALIEN, Taiwan, Sept 24 (Reuters): Fourteen people have died in Taiwan's popular tourist hub in the eastern county of Hualien, with 124 missing after a barrier lake in the mountains overflowed to deluge a town during a typhoon, the fire department said on Wednesday.

Taiwan has been lashed since Monday by the outer rim of Super Typhoon Ragasa, now hitting China's southern coast and the Asian financial hub of Hong Kong.

The barrier lake, formed by landslides triggered by earlier heavy rain in the island's sparsely populated east, burst its banks on Tuesday afternoon to send a wall of water into the township of Guangfu.

The water hit like a "tsunami", said a Guangfu postman who gave his family name of Hsieh, though he was able to flee to the second floor of the post office just in time. Later, he got home to find his car had been swept into the living-room.

Fire officials said all the dead and missing were in Guangfu, where the waters swept away a major road bridge across a river.

Wang Tse-an said his entire village of Dama, home to about 1,000 people in the township, had been flooded and many were still stranded.

"It's chaotic now," Wang, the village chief, told Reuters, adding that the most important task was to get people to safety in shelters, while supplies could not get through.

"There are mud and rocks everywhere. Some flooding has subsided but some remains."

Photo from Reuters