Typhoon threatens China after 10 dead or missing in Taiwan

Air traffic in Taiwan was seriously disrupted Saturday due to Typhoon Soudelor, which had been battering the island with gusty winds and torrential rains since late Friday, according to the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA).

About two million households have been left without electricity.

As the storm approached Taiwan earlier this week, hundreds of people were evacuated from high-risk areas, authorities issued flood and mudslide alerts and schools and government offices were closed for all or part of Friday in some areas, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported.

More than 2,000 people have already been relocated from Taiwan’s outlying islands, popular with tourists, and troops were preparing to help more residents move from their homes into shelters, the South China News reported.

A mother holds her children in strong gusts from Typhoon Soudelor in Taipei, Taiwan, on Friday. Another girl, aged 8, has been missing since Thursday.

TAIPEI/YILAN, Taiwan An increadable storm damaged Taiwan on Saturday by having robust blowing wind and heavy rainfall, cutting down ability to almost 3m families and smashing four mankind.

“The group went to the beach but were swept out to sea by strong waves”, a spokesman for the fire bureau in Yilan County told AFP.

China’s National Meteorological Center (NMC) predicted Soudelor would make landfall on Saturday night in Fujian, somewhere in a band roughly between the cities of Fuzhou and Xiamen.

Earlier in the week, forecasters declared Soudelor to be the world’s strongest typhoon so far this year, though it later weakened.

Suspended work and classes for the whole day, while other town and municipalities followed suit after 6pm yesterday.

More than 30,000 members of the Taiwanese military have been deployed to assist in evacuations.Soudelor was described as a “super typhoon” by the Hong Kong Observatory earlier in the week as it reached maximum sustained wind speeds of 230kph.

The young girl and her mother were swept out to sea in Taiwan’s eastern Yilan county on Thursday.

The eye of the storm was 60 kilometers southwest of central Taiwan’s Taichung city as of 9 a.m. Saturday and heading northwest at 19 kph, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau.

“The search for the missing girl stopped for today as it was getting dark but will continue”.

The defense ministry had readied 100 shelters that could accommodate more than 45,000 people while around 35,000 soldiers were on standby for disaster relief.