Six killed as tropical storm hits southern China
The death toll from Tropical Storm Prapiroon rose to six in south China today as the storm weakened further into a tropical depression but continued to drench an area where 400,000 people had been evacuated.
Five people were killed in Guangdong province, where the storm made landfall late yesterday while still a powerful typhoon, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Two men were crushed by walls blown down by the storm and a woman was hit by an advertising billboard that had come loose, according to the Sina.com news website.
Two others were killed by lightning, said the official China News Service.
The sixth person was killed by a landslide in the Guangxi region just to the south, where 840 houses and 830 acres of farmland were destroyed by the storm, Xinhua said. The report said direct economic losses in Guangxi were estimated at about three million dollars.
People who answered calls at Guangdong’s flood control headquarters and Civil Affairs Bureau said they had no information about the deaths and were not authorised to speak to reporters. Calls to the provincial government spokesman’s office rang unanswered.
Guangdong’s provincial government’s website didn’t mention the deaths, but said officials had sent 11 million mobile phone text messages to warn people of the storm’s arrival – standard procedure over the past year.
By late morning, Prapiroon’s wind speed had dropped from tropical storm as it dumped rain on the Guangxi region on China’s southern coast, the China Meteorological Administration said.
The storm’s sustained wind speed slowed to 51 miles per hour, down from 74 mph when it came ashore last night, the agency said. Prapiroon was expected to keep moving west or northwest at eight miles per hour.
Heavy rain and wind was forecast until Saturday across the provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan and Hainan, China’s southernmost island and a popular tourist destination.
Authorities had evacuated about 400,000 residents in low-lying areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan, about 370 miles southwest of Hong Kong in the South China Sea, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Ferry services linking Hainan to the mainland were also suspended.
Some 84,000 people were forced to flee their homes in Guangxi, Xinhua said. It didn’t give a breakdown of the evacuations in Guangdong and Hainan.
More than 62,000 boats returned to port in the three provinces, and rescue teams were put on alert, Xinhua said.
A number of sailors were rescued from stranded craft yesterday, including nine Vietnamese taken off a cargo ship, Xinhua said.
Prapiroon killed six people earlier as it passed across the Philippines, and one person in Hong Kong was injured on Wednesday when high winds toppled empty cargo containers at a shipping terminal.
Several vessels ran aground and ferry services were suspended.
Hong Kong’s airport said hundreds of flights were diverted, delayed or cancelled.
The typhoon season started early in China this year, where storms have already killed more than 1,460 people, mainly in the densely populated southeast.
Chinese officialsestimate more than one million houses have been damaged and millions of acres of farmland and forests destroyed.
Prapiroon, named after the Thai rain god, is the region’s eighth major storm of the season. It comes in the wake of last week’s Typhoon Kaemi, which killed at least 35 people in China and left dozens missing in flooding and landslides.
