Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in southeastern Chinese province of Fujian Friday morning after killing at least 12 people in the Philippines and Taiwan, bringing torrential rains and gales and forcing local authorities to close schools and suspend public transport and flights.
(Bloomberg) — Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in southeastern Chinese province of Fujian Friday morning after killing at least 12 people in the Philippines and Taiwan, bringing torrential rains and gales and forcing local authorities to close schools and suspend public transport and flights.
The massive storm hit 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, according to the National Meteorological Center.
Quanzhou, a city near Jinjiang, 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, a major port city of Fujian. 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.
China’s government 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.
China has raised its emergency responses for typhoons 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 government has 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. Zhangzhou city, near Xiamen, has suspended work and classes for two days.
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 severe typhoon 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 because of the typhoon, while the storm also caused numerous flight cancellations in the Philippines earlier this week. As the storm heads into mainland China, Taiwan has lifted land warnings for most of the island outside the storm circle, 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 and Dan Murtaugh.
(Updates with social media posts on impact, HK canceling warning, Taiwan’s efforts to restore power)
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