EMERGENCY crews scrambled to restore power to tens of thousands of homes in Taiwan after Typhoon Champi battered the island, with the storm moving towards China and Japan.
Authorities evacuated over 5,000 people from their homes ahead of the storm, which toppled trees, brought down power lines and triggered brief flooding yesterday.
At least one person has been killed and more than 500 injured since Thursday, when the government began issuing warnings about the approaching typhoon.
Around 56,000 households were still without power as Champi continued to buffet the island, with nearly 24cm of rain recorded in the western county of Miaoli yesterday.
Most shops across northern and central Taiwan were closed for a second day, as the typhoon gradually moves away from the island’s northeast and heads north towards China and Japan.
“Although the period of the typhoon’s most severe impact has passed, we would like to remind everyone that winds and waves in the waters around Taiwan remain strong as the typhoon moves northwards,” the Central Weather Administration’s Wuu Woan-hwa said at a briefing yesterday.
Champi is the latest in a busy Pacific storm season turbocharged by the El Nino weather phenomenon that has caused unprecedented warming in the equatorial Pacific.
The storm was briefly a super typhoon as it crossed the ocean in recent days, with reported maximum sustained wind speeds of nearly 300kph.
It was packing wind speeds of 120kph yesterday, according to the latest update from the Joint Typhoon Warning Centre.
The storm’s intensity weakened overnight as it made a loop off Taiwan’s northeastern county of Yilan, where it has dumped 65cm of rain since Thursday, the forecaster said.
Authorities in China warned of “strong winds and heavy rain” as Champi approached the country’s east coast, state-controlled broadcaster CCTV said.
Some train services had been suspended, while tens of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in Shanghai.
“Some areas of Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang and other regions are expected to experience heavy to torrential rainfall,” it said.
Dozens of flights have been cancelled in the region, including in Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa where the government said two people were injured in the typhoon.
Tourists on Ishigaki island waited for flights to resume so they could return home.
“We hope it’s our last day,” Eva Malek, 49, from Poland said.
“It’s not easy to have information. We were not aware of the situation and didn’t expect something like this to happen.
“When the typhoon arrived, we didn’t think it would be that strong,” she added. — AFP
