64 dead as storm rakes Philippines, then China
HONG KONG — Typhoon Mangkhut barreled 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 127 miles per hour and gusts of 158 mph.
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 threestory 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 before Tacio, the police official, left the area 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.
The storm shattered glass windows on commercial skyscrapers in Hong Kong, sending sheets of paper pouring out of the buildings, fluttering and spiraling as they headed for the debris-strewn ground, according to several videos posted on social media.
Mangkhut also felled trees, tore bamboo scaffolding off buildings under construction and flooded some areas of Hong Kong with waisthigh waters, according to the South China Morning Post.
The paper said the heavy rains brought storm surges of 10 feet around Hong Kong.
The storm made landfall in the Guangdong city of Taishan at 5 p.m., packing wind speeds of 100 miles per hour.
In Macau, next door to Hong Kong, casinos were ordered to close from 11 p.m. Saturday, the South China Morning Post reported. In the city’s inner harbor district, the water level reached 5 feet on Sunday and was expected to rise further.