Typhoon Doksuri: Schools closed, flights suspended in parts of China

BEIJING: Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in southeastern Chinese province of Fujian Friday morning after killing at least 12 people in the Philippines and Taiwan, forcing local authorities to close schools and suspend public transport and flights.

The massive storm hit the coastal city of Jinjiang, across from the Taiwan Strait, at 9:55am local time Friday and is expected to continue moving northwest and weaken gradually, according to a report by state broadcaster CCTV, without providing details. Earlier on Friday, China’s National Meteorological Centre said the typhoon will land in the port city of Xiamen and Hui’an along the coast of Fujian and is expected to bring gales and heavy rain.
The government urged local authorities to carry out emergency prevention and rescue work, including directing vessels to take shelter and halting large-scale indoor and outdoor gatherings and outdoor work, while taking precaution against mountain floods that may be caused by heavy rainfall, according to an official statement.

China has raised its emergency responses for typhoons to the highest level of its four-tier color-coded system as Doksuri turned into a super typhoon that caused chest-deep floods in the northern Philippines and disrupted power to more than 200,000 households in Taiwan.
The Chinese government has told local meteorological authorities in Fujian’s neighboring provinces, including Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangxi, to raise their emergency response levels to prevent disasters.
Multiple highways in Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong have been closed temporarily, CCTV reported Friday. Xiamen has announced closures to offices and schools from 3pm Thursday. Zhangzhou city, near Xiamen, has suspended work and classes for two days.
China Eastern Airlines Corp. has said its inbound and outbound flights in several southeastern cities will be canceled from Thursday through Saturday to ensure passenger safety. The airport of Fuzhou, capital city of Fujian, has canceled more than 50 flights Thursday, according to CCTV. Dozens of train services in the Yangtze River Delta in eastern China have also been suspended, according to China Railway’s Shanghai bureau.
Hong Kong, which is also calling the storm a super typhoon, maintains its lowest alert Friday morning. But the local observatory said Doksuri will gradually depart from Hong Kong as it is forecast to move north-northwest at about 28 kilometres per hour edging closer to the vicinity of Xiamen.
Hong Kong’s Cathay Paciific Airways Ltd said some of its flights scheduled to arrive in and depart from Taiwan’s Kaohsiung city on Thursday have been delayed or canceled, while those scheduled to fly into and out of Xiamen have also been canceled Thursday due to the closure of the local airport.
In Taiwan, more than 300 domestic and international flights were scrapped because of the typhoon, while the storm also caused numerous flight cancellations in the Philippines earlier this week. Land and sea warnings will be lifted earliest in the afternoon and or the evening, Central News Agency reported Friday.
In the northern Philippine province of Cagayan, where Doksuri made landfall as a super typhoon earlier, nearly 16,000 people were evacuated.
Although more than 180,000 people in the southeast Asian country have been affected by the storm, the devastation appears much less than in October last year, when more than 100 people died from floods and landslides triggered by storm Nalgae, which also displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
There also appears to have been relatively limited damage to the country’s agriculture. The typhoon caused an estimated 53.1 million pesos ($973,080) of damage to crops, primarily for rice and corn, according to its agriculture department. Taiwan estimates its agricultural losses from the typhoon to be about NT$1.5 million ($48,000).