Officials in the Philippines are assessing damage after Typhoon Mangkhut pummelled the country, bringing with it strong winds and rains that set off landslides.
Two women were killed on Saturday in a landslide set off by the typhoon, Philippine police said, the first reported deaths in the massive storm.
Officers in the city of Baguio recovered the women’s bodies from the soil and rubble after a hillside collapsed from the typhoon’s heavy rains, said police Superintendent Pilita Tacio.
Earlier, Secretary of National Defence Delfin Lorenzana said officials in northeastern Cagayan province, where the typhoon slammed ashore before dawn, were verifying the drownings of two children.
On Saturday, authorities were also checking what happened to about 70 men who reportedly returned to their coastal village to check on their homes during dangerous storm surges that saw walls of seawater whipped inland.
Mangkhut’s sustained winds weakened to 170 kilometres an hour with gusts of up to 260km/h after it sliced across Luzon Island’s flood-prone rice plains and mountain provinces towards the South China Sea, aiming at southern China and Hong Kong, where residents braced for the worst.
‘Life and death situation’
“It’s still a life and death situation,” Lorenzana said by telephone, citing past drownings in swollen rivers in mountain provinces.
More than 15,000 people were evacuated in the northern provinces by Friday afternoon, the Office of Civil Defence was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. But the country’s disaster management office said more than 30,000 have been evacuated.
Al Jazeera’s Jamela Alindogan, reporting from Cagayan province, said at least 100 families, mostly from fishing and farming villages, had taken shelter in a school.
Mangkhut is the 15th storm to batter the Philippines this year. An average of 20 typhoons hit the country each year.
Authorities are taking extra precautions as they draw comparisons with Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated central areas of the archipelago in 2013, and killed 6,300 people.
“My appeal is that we need to heed the advice of the authorities. Stay indoors,” said presidential adviser Francis Tolentino, the government’s main coordinator for disaster response.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it expects “substantial damage” in the Philippines.
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| An elderly Filipino woman is seen in the typhoon-hit town of Aparri, Cagayan province [EPA] |
SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies
