Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in southeastern Chinese province of Fujian Friday after killing at least 12 people in the Philippines and Taiwan, bringing torrential rains and gales and forcing local authorities to close schools, suspend public transport and evacuate more than 120,000 people.
(Bloomberg) — Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in southeastern Chinese province of Fujian Friday after killing at least 12 people in the Philippines and Taiwan, bringing torrential rains and gales and forcing local authorities to close schools, suspend public transport and evacuate more than 120,000 people.
The massive storm landed in the coastal city of Jinjiang, across from the Taiwan Strait, at 0955 a.m. local time Friday and is expected to continue moving northwest before weakening gradually, according to a report by state broadcaster CCTV. Doksuri is likely to become the most powerful typhoon to hit Fujian since 1949, the National Meteorological Center has warned.
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As of 2 p.m. local time Friday, the typhoon had affected more than 724,600 people across nine cities in Fujian, including Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou, and forced emergency evacuation of more than 124,400 people, CCTV said. Direct economic loss reached 52 million yuan ($7.3 million), while the affected area of crops is 262 hectares.
Quanzhou reported more than 100 minor injuries and 500,000 households without power, according to a state media report. Videos and pictures posted on China’s social media including Weibo Friday showed the typhoon rampaging through Quanzhou and Xiamen. One video clip showed many window panes of a residential tower in Quanzhou were blown off, while numerous air-conditioners installed outside the windows of a building in Shishi, another city on Fujian’s coast, broke loose and fell to the street.
Before its arrival, China has raised its emergency responses to the highest level of its four-tier color-coded system as Doksuri turned into a super typhoon that caused chest-deep floods in the northern Philippines and disrupted power to more than 200,000 households in Taiwan.
The Chinese government has urged local authorities to carry out emergency prevention and rescue work, including directing vessels to take shelter and halting large-scale indoor and outdoor gatherings and outdoor work, while taking precaution against mountain floods that may be caused by heavy rainfall, according to an official statement.
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It has also told local meteorological authorities in Fujian’s neighboring provinces, including Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangxi, to raise their emergency response levels to prevent disasters. Multiple highways in Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong have been closed temporarily, CCTV reported Friday. Xiamen has announced closures to offices and schools from 3 p.m. Thursday. At least one container port in the city has suspended operations. Zhangzhou city, near Xiamen, has halted work and classes for two days.
In Guangdong, at least one major liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal suspended work because of the storm, while state oil producer China National Offshore Oil Corp. raised its LNG sale price because the typhoon has caused delay in offloading and truck deliveries in several ports in southeast China, according to Zhongyou LNG Information.
China Eastern Airlines Corp. has said its inbound and outbound flights in several southeastern cities will be canceled from Thursday through Saturday to ensure passenger safety. The airport of Fuzhou, capital city of Fujian, has canceled more than 50 flights Thursday, according to CCTV. Dozens of train services in the Yangtze River Delta in eastern China have also been suspended, according to China Railway’s Shanghai bureau.
Hong Kong’s Cathay Paciific Airways Ltd said some of its flights scheduled to arrive in and depart from Taiwan’s Kaohsiung city on Thursday have been delayed or canceled, while those scheduled to fly into and out of Xiamen have also been canceled Thursday due to the closure of the local airport.
Hong Kong canceled all warning signals for Doksuri Friday afternoon as it expects it to move further into Fujian and Jiangxi province in the next couple of days and weaken progressively, the local observatory said.
In Taiwan, more than 300 domestic and international flights were scrapped, while the storm also caused numerous flight cancellations in the Philippines earlier this week. As the storm heads into mainland China, Taiwan has lifted its land and sea warnings, the Central Weather Bureau said.
Taiwan Power Co., a state-owned utility, has sought help from the airforce and will coordinate with the island’s disaster response center and army to transport repair personnel, vehicles and equipment to offshore island Kinmen to restore power, according to a statement from the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Over 6,000 Kinmen households are still without power.
In the northern Philippine province of Cagayan, where Doksuri made landfall as a super typhoon earlier, nearly 16,000 people were evacuated.
Although more than 180,000 people in the southeast Asian country have been affected by the storm, the devastation appears much less than in October last year, when more than 100 people died from floods and landslides triggered by storm Nalgae, which also displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
There also appears to have been relatively limited damage to the country’s agriculture. The typhoon caused an estimated 53.1 million pesos ($973,080) of damage to crops, primarily for rice and corn, according to its agriculture department. Taiwan estimates its agricultural losses from the typhoon to be about NT$1.5 million ($48,000).
–With assistance from Sanjit Das, Yanping Li, Adrian Kennedy, Dan Murtaugh, Kathy Chen and Dominic Lau.
(Updates throughout with details, including number of people affected and evacuated)
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