Thousands of soldiers and rescue workers began cleaning up Taipei's flooded mass transit system on Thursday after Typhoon Nari dumped record amounts of rain on Taiwan and killed at least 80 people. 
The National Fire Administration's disaster response center said 80 people were killed by the storm, which was heading toward Hong Kong on Thursday. Drowning or landslides caused most casualties, the center said. 
At least 19 people were missing and 208 injured after Nari turned roads in Taipei into torrents of water that flowed past second-story windows at the height of the flooding earlier this week. 
A big clean-up was underway with about 16,000 soldiers armed with shovels and brooms helping. More than 3,400 people, whose homes were damaged or flooded, remained in shelters. 
Several mass rapid transit (MRT) stations were flooded and the system, parts of which are underground, was expected to be disrupted for weeks or even months. City officials scrambled to find alternative means of transport for 900,000 commuters who use the system every day. 
More than 2,000 soldiers and workers have been working around the clock to drain the MRT network and officials said they expected to finish pumping it out by late Friday. 
"About 100 water pumps have joined in the work, and we expect to complete it by the end of Friday," Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou told reporters. 
Two of the five MRT lines were open, one was shut down, while the other two were partly open, said Henry Chen, a spokesman of the state-run Taipei Rapid Transit Corp. 
"After we pump water out of our system, we need to clean up the mud and test our equipment," Chen said. "There is so much work that needs to be done that it will easily take months to resume full operations." 
Chen said no official estimates for losses were available but the rapid transit corporation's daily revenue was believed to be 80 percent lower than the usual total of about $580,000. 
Taipei's main train station was also under water as were the basement parking lots of scores of buildings in the capital. 
The disaster response center said rail services from Taipei to the southern port city of Kaohsiung would resume on Saturday, but it would take two weeks to resume services to the northern city of Keelung. 
The Central Weather Bureau lifted a three-day storm warning over land on Wednesday. The typhoon was 170 miles east of Hong Kong, heading west at eight mph on Thursday morning. 
Taiwan's financial markets reopened on Wednesday after staying closed for two days because of the storm. 
Despite investors' worry about the cost of storm damage, the benchmark TAIEX index closed 0.17 percent higher on Wednesday. By late morning on Thursday it was 2.01 percent lower. 
As of Wednesday, 307,000 households were still without electricity and 524,000 were without water. 
There was still no official estimate for total storm damage but losses were expected to batter the island's economy, already reeling from its worst slowdown in almost three decades. 
The Taiwan Stock Exchange said publicly-listed companies reported a total of $42 million in typhoon-related damage. 
Taiwan's agricultural losses from the storm rose to $60 million as floods inundated about 57,037 acres of farmland, the cabinet's Council of Agriculture said on Thursday. 
In July, Typhoon Toraji -- one of the worst to hit Taiwan -- ripped through the island killing about 200 people and causing more than $173 million in damage. 
