A powerful typhoon that battered Tokyo overnight with ferocious winds killed one person, police said yesterday, as halted trains caused commuter chaos and more than 100 flights were canceled.
Typhoon Faxai, packing record winds of up to 207kph, made landfall in Chiba just east of the capital before dawn, after barrelling through Tokyo Bay.
The transport disruptions unleashed by the storm came less than two weeks before the start of the Rugby World Cup and delayed the arrival of the Australia team.
Photo: Kyodo / via Reuters
Police confirmed that one person was killed in the storm, a woman in her 50s who was found dead in Tokyo.
Security camera footage showed that she was pushed across a street and into a wall by high winds, a police spokesman said.
Another woman in her 20s was rescued from her house in Ichihara, east of Tokyo, after it was partly crushed when a perimeter fence from a golf driving range fell on it. She was seriously injured.
“There was a huge grinding noise, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I looked out the window,” a neighbor told NHK.
More than 30 people were injured in the storm, the Kyodo news agency said, while authorities said that more than 2,000 people had taken refuge in shelters.
The strong winds downed trees and power lines, which left 910,000 people without electricity in the Tokyo area yesterday morning, including the entire city of Kamogawa, NHK said.
“I’ve never seen a situation like this, the whole city without power,” an official told NHK.
At least 10 homes were damaged in Shizuoka, with windows shattered and cars flipped on their sides, local media reported.
Elsewhere, scaffolding was ripped from buildings and protective sheeting hung to keep construction debris off the streets was crumpled and torn by the storm.
While the damage was relatively light given the wind speeds, it was enough to cause chaos in the capital’s notoriously busy morning commute.
The overland East Japan Railway train system was largely halted in the early hours of operation while tracks were checked for fallen trees and other debris.
The storm also caused delays and stoppages on subway lines, leading to massive crowds at some stations in the busy metropolitan area that is home to 36 million people.
The usually congested trains and major stations were even more crowded than usual once services resumed, with trains stopping temporarily and running erratically.
“I can’t go to work now, and I also had to contact my customers,” said Tsubasa Kikuchi, a 23-year-old real-estate worker, who had been waiting at Shimbashi Station for more than two hours. “This is troublesome.”
Trains and shuttle buses running to and from Narita International Airport were halted, with taxis the only options left to those arriving or hoping to fly out. More than 5,000 passengers were stranded at the airport.
By mid-Monday morning, the storm had moved offshore and was headed northeast away from Japan, back into the Pacific.
Additional reporting by Reuters and Bloomberg
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done