Typhoon Chan-Hom made landfall in eastern China on an island near the city of Ningbo late yesterday afternoon, Beijing said.
Chan-Hom, which the government classified as a “strong” typhoon, landed at the town of Zhujiajian at about 4:40pm, China’s National Meteorological Center said, but gave no immediate reports of damage or casualties.
The storm had paralyzed transport links and devastated farmland on China’s eastern coast earlier in the day, after nearly 1 million people fled its approach, state media and the government said.
Photo: EPA
No casualties have been reported so far, Xinhua news agency reported.
A security guard died and four people were injured by falling trees in Taiwan when the storm buffeted the nation on Friday.
The severe typhoon could be the strongest to hit Zhejiang Province in any July since 1949, China’s meteorological center said last week.
Photo: AP
Zhejiang evacuated about 960,000 people and called its entire fishing fleet back to port, state media said. Provincial authorities said earlier that nearly 30,000 vessels had moored safely.
Typhoon winds blew down trees and street signs across Zhejiang and knocked down an unoccupied building in the city of Cixi, provincial television reported.
In Zhejiang’s Sanmen County, local television showed dozens of melons floating in a flooded field, as a farmer lamented his lost harvest.
Photo: AFP
“There might be no crop this year,” he said.
Some parts of Zhejiang were deluged with more than 30cm of rain in the 24 hours before yesterday morning, local government officials said.
In Taizhou City, rain triggered a landslide which briefly blocked a road.
More than 600 flights at four airports in Zhejiang were canceled, Xinhua said.
In Shanghai, the city government maintained its second-highest typhoon alert, urging people to stay home and canceling several public events as rain picked up toward midday.
“We recommend everyone does their best to use ‘squatting at home’ tactics to welcome the typhoon,” the Shanghai government said in a posting on its official microblog.
More than 400 flights at the city’s two airports were canceled, along with 330 long-distance bus journeys and several trains, media reports said.
Traffic thinned in Shanghai, though enterprising taxi drivers still cruised the streets looking for fares despite the storm, which blew branches off trees.
Chan-Hom was forecast to affect a wide region in China, also bringing heavy rain to the eastern provinces of Fujian and Jiangsu, the weather center said.
Fujian, south of Zhejiang, evacuated more than 30,000 people and Jiangsu another 10,000.
The typhoon is the second storm to hit China in days, after severe Tropical Storm Linfa made landfall on the coast of Guangdong Province further south. The US government’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecast that after hitting China, Chan-Hom would head toward the Korean Peninsula, bringing “gale-force” winds to the west coast of South Korea.
The storm left five people dead in the Philippines earlier in the week and injured more than 20 people in Japan on Friday.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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