The typhoon crumpled giant container cranes, heaved an evacuated ocean liner onto a beach, sank scores of vessels and plunged more than a million homes into darkness in the southeast industrial heartland.

Thousands of homes were still without electricity yesterday.

"Rescue and repair work is going on round the clock with soldiers, police personnel and others helping residents," Seo Jung-pyo, an official at the National Disaster Prevention and Countermeasures Headquarters, told Reuters.

The government is allocating more than $1 billion in disaster relief and early estimates of the damage are running to at least $1 billion.

Financial markets delivered a grim verdict on the cost to Asia's fourth-largest economy, which entered its first recession since the 1997-98 financial crisis in the second quarter.

The stock market fell one percent by midday, with top exporters and shipbuilders leading the way, but contractors and cement producers shot up as investors expected rebuilding work to boost their business.

The won currency lost ground but government bond prices surged because investors favored fixed assets over stocks amid uncertainty over the U.S. economy and over the domestic one now it had been hit by a typhoon.

The government was scrambling to assess whether the typhoon could hurt growth prospects for the third quarter and the year.

PUSAN PORT NEAR NORMAL

The government said it would allocate 1.4 trillion won in disaster relief. State banks offered soft loan packages to help people and companies.

Seo at the anti-disaster office said the cost of damage, put at $1.07 billion as of early Yesterday, could rise.

Most of the deaths were from electrocution, landslides and drowning. The capital, Seoul, in the north of the country, was unaffected.

Typhoon Maemi, or "cicada" in Korean, dumped up to 18 inches of rain in some areas, triggering floods that forced 25,000 people to evacuate their homes, before heading out to sea some seven hours later.

Typhoons often strike South Korea at this time of year. The country's worst storm, Typhoon Sara, killed 849 people in 1959.

The typhoon mauled the main port of Pusan, one of Asia's busiest. The port was operating at about 80 percent capacity yesterday.