BEIJING – The most powerful typhoon to hit China in five decades raged across its southeastern coast Thursday, claiming at least 111 lives as it capsized ships, destroyed buildings and forced 1.5 million people from their homes.
Typhoon Saomai, with winds up to 135 mph, made landfall at the town of Mazhan in coastal Zhejiang province, the Xinhua News Agency said, citing weather officials.
The death toll was put at two Thursday as the storm raged, but it quickly rose today with recovery efforts under way and had reached 111 by midday, according to Xinhua.
Eighty-one people were killed in the southeastern Zhejiang city of Wenzhou, Xinhua said. It did not give any details, but the bodies of 43 people, including eight children, were discovered in Wenzhou amid the debris of collapsed houses.
Another 28 people were killed and 11 missing in other parts of Zhejiang, Xinhua said without elaborating. In neighboring Fujian province, two people were killed.
Torrential rains were forecast in the next three days as the typhoon churned inland across crowded areas where Tropical Storm Bilis killed more than 600 people last month.
Eight Taiwanese sailors were missing after two ships capsized in a harbor in Fujian, while four Chinese were missing after their ship struck a reef, the agency reported. Seven others were reported missing in the Philippines after giant waves and heavy rains generated by the typhoon battered coastal villages, officials said.
Saomai, dubbed a “super typhoon” by Chinese forecasters due to its huge size and high wind speeds, was the eighth major storm of this year’s unusually violent typhoon season. Saomai was the most powerful typhoon to hit China since the founding of the communist government in 1949, Xinhua said, citing the Zhejiang provincial weather bureau.
Before the storm’s arrival, 990,000 people were evacuated from flood-prone areas of Zhejiang and 569,000 from the neighboring coastal province of Fujian, Xinhua said. It said a total of 70,000 ships had returned to port in the two provinces.
Saomai, named for the Vietnamese word for the planet Venus, passed across Japan’s Okinawa island group on Wednesday with winds up to 89 mph, prompting airlines to cancel 141 flights and affecting 24,000 passengers.
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