Beijing – The most powerful typhoon to hit China in five decades raged across its southeastern coast Thursday, claiming at least 83 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 underway and had reached 111 by midday, according to Xinhua.
Xinhua sent separate reports with fatality tolls totaling 111 but later put the overall number of deaths at 83. It said 81 were in the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, including 43 people in suburban Cangnan County.
Officials said at least 80 people were injured across the region. The typhoon also was blamed for at least two deaths in the Philippines earlier.
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, Xinhua reported. Seven others were reported missing in the Philippines after giant waves and heavy rains generated battered coastal villages, officials said.
Saomai, dubbed a “super typhoon” by Chinese forecasters because of 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.
The area is about 950 miles south of Beijing, the Chinese capital, which was not affected by the storm.
In the Philippines, more than 200 houses built on stilts were destroyed and a child was killed and another was reported missing as waves up to 10 feet tall ravaged the coast of Bongao, the capital of southern Tawi- Tawi province, before dawn Wednesday, provincial Gov. Sadikul Sahali said.
“There is floating debris everywhere,” Sahali said.
