mm-news-@dmin Just over 10,000 Filipinos have been evacuated across the Philippines.
MANILA: The Chinese city of Shenzhen began preparing to evacuate 400,000 people while residents of the northern Philippines sought shelter from gale-force winds Monday as Super Typhoon Ragasa continued on a collision course with southern China.
The typhoon made landfall on the Philippines’ Calayan Island, part of the sparsely populated Babuyan chain, at 3 pm (0700 GMT), according to the Philippine weather service.
As of 2 pm (0600 GMT), maximum sustained winds of 215 kilometres per hour were reported at the storm’s centre, with gusts reaching as high as 295 kph, the national weather service said.
“I woke up because of the strong wind. “It was hitting the windows, and it sounded like a machine switching on,” said Tirso Tugagao, a resident of Aparri, a coastal town in northern Cagayan province.
Cagayan disaster chief Rueli Rapsing told AFP his team was prepared for “the worst”.
Just over 10,000 Filipinos have been evacuated across the country, while schools and government offices were closed Monday in the Manila region and 29 other provinces.
A much larger operation will take place in China’s Shenzhen, where authorities said late Sunday they planned to move hundreds of thousands of people from coastal and low-lying regions.
Multiple other cities in Guangdong province announced classes and work would be cancelled, and public transportation would be suspended because of the typhoon.
Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific said it expected to cancel more than 500 flights as Ragasa threatened the financial hub.
A spokeswoman for the airline said passenger flights in and out of Hong Kong International Airport would be halted from 6 pm Tuesday, “resuming during daytime hours on Thursday”.
‘Extremely torrential’
In Taiwan, the state weather service predicted a chance of “extremely torrential rain” in the country’s east.
“Its storm radius is quite large, about 320 (kilometres). Although the typhoon’s centre is still some distance away, its wide, strong wind field and outer circulation are already affecting parts of Taiwan.”
James Wu, a local fire department officer, told AFP that evacuations were ongoing in mountainous areas near Pingtung.
“What worries us more is that the damage could be similar to what happened during Typhoon Koinu two years ago,” he added, describing a storm that saw utility poles collapse and sheet-metal roofs sent flying into the air.
On Sunday, Philippine government weather specialist John Grender Almario warned that the northern areas of Luzon could face “severe flooding and landslides.”
The threat of flooding from Ragasa comes just a day after thousands of Filipinos protested a growing corruption scandal over flood control projects that were poorly built or never completed.
The Pacific cyclone belt first strikes the Philippines, which faces about 20 storms and typhoons each year, leaving millions in disaster-prone areas trapped in constant poverty.
Scientists warn that storms are becoming more powerful as the world warms due to the effects of human-driven climate change.
