Sunday Times 2
Typhoon Chan-hom hovers off China as a million flee
View(s):SHANGHAI, July 11(AFP) -Typhoon Chan-hom paralysed transport links and devastated farmland on China’s eastern coast near Shanghai today, after nearly a million people fled the approaching storm, the government and state media said.
Huge waves were crashing into the coast of Zhejiang province (AFP)
No casualties have been reported so far, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
China’s National Meteorological Center (NMC) said the typhoon could make landfall later on Saturday in Zhejiang province near the port of Ningbo, home to almost six million people.
The severe typhoon could be the strongest to hit Zhejiang in any July since 1949, it previously said.
But Hu Yaowen, deputy head of Zhejiang’s flood control and drought prevention headquarters, said it might narrowly pass by the province and veer north, Xinhua reported.
At 3:00 pm (0700 GMT) on Saturday, the storm was around 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the Zhejiang coast and packing winds of up to 162 km per hour, said the NMC, which maintained its highest red alert for the typhoon despite downgrading it from “super” to “strong”.
Zhejiang has evacuated around 960,000 people and called its entire fishing fleet back to port, state media said. Provincial authorities said earlier that nearly 30,000 vessels had moored safely.
Typhoon winds blew down trees and street signs across Zhejiang and knocked down an unoccupied building in the city of Cixi, provincial television reported.
In Zhejiang’s Sanmen county, local television showed dozens of melons floating in a flooded field, as a farmer lamented his lost harvest. “There might be no crop this year,” he said.
Some parts of Zhejiang were deluged with more than 30 centimetres (12 inches) of rain in the 24 hours before morning, the local government said. In Taizhou city, rain triggered a landslide which briefly blocked a road.