Shanghai evacuates 1.6 million ahead of Typhoon Wypha
Shanghai closed schools and 1.6 million people were evacuated from coastal areas today as Typhoon Wipha, forecast to be the most powerful storm to hit the region, thrashed toward the Chinese mainland.
One worker was killed and another seriously injured as the fringe of the typhoon lashed Taiwan, knocking down scaffolding at a highway construction site in Taipei, Taiwan’s Disaster Relief Centre reported.
Schools, offices and the stock market in northern Taiwan were closed and flights from Taiwan to Japan, South Korea and a few other Asian countries were cancelled, officials said.
Organisers of the women’s football World Cup, meanwhile, rescheduled tomorrow’s Shanghai match between Norway and Ghana to Thursday and moved it to the neighbouring city of Hangzhou.
Tomorrow’s game in Hangzhou between Brazil and Denmark was also moved to Thursday.
Authorities ordered most schools to close tomorrow in Shanghai, a city of more than 20 million people and China’s financial hub. The Shanghai Stock Exchange might close if “emergency measures” were necessary, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Chinese state-run television showed families being evacuated from their fishing boats and other vessels. Shopkeepers stacked sand bags to prevent flooding as drains clogged amid torrential rains.
The storm forced the cancellation of many flights out of Shanghai and other regional airports, state media reports said.
The typhoon, whipping up waves up to 36ft high, was moving north west toward the coast and was forecast to make landfall south of Shanghai early tomorrow morning.
Wipha, a woman’s name in Thai, was upgraded from a tropical storm yesterday. With wind gusts of up to 180mph, local meteorological officials said it could be the most destructive storm to hit the Shanghai area in years.
“The typhoon is very likely to develop into the worst one in recent years. We are still observing it. It’s hard to say at this moment,” said the city’s meteorological office.
Shanghai and the coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian to the south issued typhoon warnings requiring all vessels to return to shore or change course to avoid the storm, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It said that 1.6 million people living in coastal or low-lying areas of Shanghai, Zhejiang and Fujian had been evacuated.
The deadliest storm to hit the China coast in recent years was Typhoon Winnie in 1997, which killed 236 people. Typhoon Rananim, with winds of more than 100mph, was the strongest typhoon to hit the Chinese mainland since 1956, killing nearly 200 people.
