THE country raised its highest storm alert and evacuated thousands of people as Super Typhoon Usagi barrelled towards its already disaster-ravaged north.
Packing sustained winds of up to 180km an hour, Usagi is set to smash onto the main island of Luzon in the afternoon – the fifth storm to threaten the country in just three weeks.
The brutal weather disturbances has already killed 159 people.
The national weather agency said the winds could cause “almost total damage to structures of light materials, especially in highly exposed coastal areas”, and “heavy damage” to buildings otherwise considered “low-risk”.
“Intense to torrential rain” and potentially “life-threatening” coastal waves of up to 3m were also forecast over two days, with the storm warning raised to the highest signal on a five-step scale.
“Evacuations are ongoing” in coastal and low-lying areas of Cagayan province, its civil defence chief Rueli Rapsing said.
He expects local governments to take 40,000 people to shelters, roughly the same number that were pre-emptively evacuated ahead of Typhoon Yinxing, which struck Cagayan’s north coast earlier this month.
He said more than 5,000 Cagayan residents were still in shelters following the previous storms.This was because the Cagayan river, the country’s largest, remained swollen from heavy rain that fell in several provinces upstream, flooding communities downstream.
“We expect this situation to persist over the next few days” as Usagi brings more rain, Rapsing said. — AFP
