Typhoon lashing south China
After killing dozens in Philippines, storm hits Hong Kong, mainland
HONG KONG— Typhoon Mangkhut barrelled into southern China on Sunday, killing two people after lashing the Philippines with strong winds and heavy rain that left at least 64 dead and dozens more feared buried in a landslide.
More than 2.4 million people had been evacuated in southern China’s Guangdong province by Sunday evening to flee the massive typhoon and nearly 50,000 fishing boats were called back to port, state media reported. It threatened to be the strongest typhoon to hit Hong Kong in nearly two decades.
“Prepare for the worst,” Hong Kong Security Minister John Lee Ka-chiu urged residents. That warning came after Mangkhut’s devastating march through the northern Philippines, where the storm made landfall Saturday on Luzon island with sustained winds of 205 km/h and gusts of 255 km/h.
Police Superintendent Pelita Tacio said 34 villagers had died and 36 remained missing in landslides in two villages in Itogon town in the northern Philippine mountain province of Benguet.
Itogon Mayor Victorio Palangdan told The Associated Press by phone that at the height of the typhoon’s onslaught Saturday afternoon, dozens of people, mostly miners and their families, rushed into an old three-story building in the village of Ucab.
The building — a former mining bunkhouse that had been transformed into a chapel — was obliterated when part of a mountain slope collapsed. Three villagers who managed to escape told authorities what happened.
“They thought they were really safe there,” the mayor said. He expressed sadness that the villagers, many of them poor, had few options to survive in a region where big corporations have profited immensely from gold mines.
Rescuers were scrambling to pull out the body of a victim from the mound of mud and rocks in Ucab, Tacio, the police official, said early Sunday.
“I could hear villagers wailing in their homes near the site of the accident,” Tacio said.
As Mangkhut spun forward, Hong Kong braced for a storm that could be the strongest to hit the city since Typhoon York in 1999.
A video posted online by residents showed the top corner of an old building break and fall off, while in another video, a tall building swayed as strong winds blew.