Typhoon Mangkhut pounds the Phillippines

Mangkhut’s sustained winds weakened to 170 kilometers per hour (km/h) with gusts of up to 260 km/h after it sliced across Luzon Island’s flood-prone rice plains and mountain provinces toward the South China Sea, aiming at southern China and Hong Kong, where residents braced for the worst.

The Philippines remains the worst hit, with more than 250,000 people affected by the storm across the country – around half of those seeking shelter in evacuation centers in the country’s north.

It is noted that the Typhoon “Mangkhut” is much stronger than that of hurricane Florence, which had landed on the East coast of the US.

In Hong Kong residents bus, ferry and rail services were suspended and nearly 900 flights were canceled at the city’s airport, one of the world’s busiest.

The airport in the boomtown of Shenzhen has been shut since midnight, and will be closed until 8:00 am. It shut casino gambling operations late on Saturday, authorities said, with China’s People’s Liberation Army on standby for any disaster relief assistance.

Typhoon Mangkhut barrelled into southern China after lashing the Philippines with strong winds and heavy rain that caused landslides feared to have buried dozens.

The storm also broke windows, felled trees, tore bamboo scaffolding off buildings under construction and flooded areas with sometimes waist-high waters, according to the South China Morning Post.

Here are some of the videos.

The paper said the heavy rains brought storm surges of 3 meters (10 feet) around Hong Kong. This shows the water crashing into the ground floor of the Sheraton in the city.

The world’s strongest storm this year, Typhoon Mangkhut, continued its path of destruction across Southeast Asia over the weekend, reaching mainland China on Sunday afternoon after pummeling Hong Kong and killing dozens in the Philippines.

People travel through a flooded road brought about by Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit the northern Philippines on Saturday. Now the storm is in China, where two were already killed in Guangdong province.

Philippine authorities said at least 25 people were killed, including a baby and a toddler, majority in landslides in mountainous areas that left at least 13 missing.

Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, one of the major aviation hubs in China, has cancelled all flights from 12pm on Sunday to 8am on Monday, affecting thousands of passengers. There were 76 reported cases of fallen trees, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government said.

The typhoon, dubbed the “King of Storms” by Chinese media, made landfall in Haiyan town at 5:00 pm. local time, packing winds of more than 160 kph (100 mph), weather officials said. The death toll jumped to 59 this evening, police said, as more landslide victims were discovered.

The typhoon displaced tens of thousands of people, mostly in the northern and central provinces, with evacuees numbering more than 150,000.

The bunkhouse was a shelter at an old mining site in the town of Itogon, almost 200km north of Manila, which “went missing” during a landslide, said Itogon Mayor Victorio Palangdan.