The typhoon Gaemi made landfall in China’s Fujian province on Thursday, after killing five people in Taiwan and partially flooding its second-largest city. Rescuers were also searching for six sailors who were missing after their cargo ship sank in the storm.
Gaemiwhich lost intensity in the morning, reached eastern China shortly before 8 p.m. local time (8 a.m. in Quebec), Chinese state television CCTV announced.
In Fujian, where rail traffic has been suspended, the second-highest flood alert level has been issued.
Chinese authorities have warned that extremely heavy rainfall could cause rivers and lakes in the province and neighbouring Zhejiang to swell.
The typhoon Gaemithe most violent to hit Taiwan in eight years, has turned the arteries of the southern city of Kaohsiung into rivers.
It made landfall on the island on Wednesday evening with gusts of wind reaching 190 km/h.
For the second day in a row, schools and offices remained closed, hundreds of flights were cancelled, the stock exchange suspended operations and thousands of people were evacuated.
A motorcyclist was crushed by a falling tree and a woman was killed in a landslide in Kaohsiung. A female driver was killed in the eastern region of Hualien and two people were killed in the southern city of Tainan.
Some 500 people were also injured.
Twenty dead in the Philippines
In the Philippines, which was not in the path of the typhoon, a total of 20 deaths were reported in Manila and surrounding provinces, caused by drowning, landslides, electrocutions and a fallen tree after torrential seasonal rains fueled by Gaemi which this week hit the northern island of Luzon, the most populated of this archipelago.
On Thursday, residents and shopkeepers in the capital struggled to clean up the mess, piling up soaked mattresses, bags of rubbish and piles of debris in muddy streets.
Zenaida Cuerda, a 55-year-old street vendor, said the food she was selling was washed away and her home in Manila was flooded. “All my capital is gone,” Cuerda told AFP. “I have nothing now, this was my only means of livelihood.”
Cargo ship sinking
Separately, a Philippine oil tanker carrying 1.4 million liters of oil sank Thursday in a storm off the capital, authorities said, as they tried to prevent an oil spill. The body of a crew member was found and an investigation into the sinking is underway.
At the same time, a Tanzanian-flagged cargo ship sank off southern Taiwan: three of the nine crew members who had initially been reported missing were found alive on shore, the Taiwanese coast guard announced on Thursday.
Two of these three survivors, foreigners whose nationality has not been specified, were “the second and the commander of the ship”, according to the same source.
“The Coast Guard will continue to expand its search for the remaining crew members who have fallen overboard.”
The sailors, forced to abandon ship, put on life jackets, but there were no lifeboats, said Hsiao Huan-chang, the head of the fire department.
“They fell into the sea and were floating,” Hsiao said, adding that a Taiwanese cargo ship had tried unsuccessfully to rescue them.
When the latter arrived, “visibility at the scene was very low and the winds were too strong,” he said, affirming that ships or helicopters will be dispatched as soon as “weather conditions permit.”