Typhoon Haitang batters Taiwan as China put on alert
Authorities in south-eastern China put 800,000 people in temporary shelters as Typhoon Haitang churned toward the coast today with fierce rains and high winds after hammering northern Taiwan and leaving three people dead.
Falling rocks killed one man in south-eastern Taiwan, two women drowned in the north of the island, and a fisherman was missing. Dozens were injured, mostly by falling trees and signboards, as swollen rivers pounded bridges and knocked away roads.
As the typhoon headed west today toward mainland China, heavy rain fell over its southern Fujian province and braced for flooding and landslides, said a weather bureau spokeswoman who identified herself only as Miss Gao.
“Comparatively speaking, it has become weaker than when it landed on Taiwan yesterday, but it’s still a typhoon, not a tropical storm,” she said, adding that Haitang was expected in the late afternoon.
Windspeeds at the typhoon’s centre were 73 miles per hour, the Fujian provincial anti-flooding bureau said.
Authorities shut the airport at the provincial capital, Fuzhou, with flights diverted to Shanghai or Xiamen in southern Fujian, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Fuzhou is 500 miles south-west of China’s commercial hub, Shanghai.
The approaching winds were blamed for eight traffic accidents yesterday on the main provincial highway, where billboards also were blown away, Xinhua said. The report gave no figures on casualties.
State broadcaster China Central Television’s main evening news report showed soldiers stacking sandbags along embankments in preparation for high waters.
Almost 540,000 people in Fujian had been moved to temporary shelters, Xinhua said. More than 17,000 boats were harbouring in Fujian to ride out the storm, the report said.
In Zhejing province just to the north, 326,000 people were evacuated and more than 25,000 ships and boats sheltering in harbours.
Haitang, named after a Chinese flower, hammered northern Taiwan yesterday.
Schools, government offices and financial markets were closed on Taiwan as torrential rains whipped through the capital Taipei, uprooting trees and dislodging billboards in the island’s north.
At 8am today, Haitang was centred on the Taiwan Strait 105 miles south-east of Fuzhou and was moving north-west at 10 miles per hour, according to the website of the Hong Kong observatory.
