Typhoon Doksuri churns past Taiwan, leaves six dead in Philippines

Typhoon Doksuri lashed southern Taiwan on Thursday after battering the Philippines, where the storm’s ferocious winds and rains triggered floods and landslides that killed at least six people.

The storm, categorised at the second-strongest typhoon level by Taiwan’s weather bureau, was heading towards the southern Taiwan Strait with maximum winds of 191km (118 miles) per hour on Thursday morning.

Doksuri has lost some of its strength since it lashed the northern Philippine coastline on Wednesday, bursting banks of rivers, flooding low-lying villages and unleashing dozens of landslides.

In the Buguias town in Benguet province, a landslide buried a house killing a mother, her child and two other children. In the nearby resort city of Baguio, a 17-year-old teen was killed when soil loosened by heavy rains buried his house, officials said.

In Isabela province, also in the north, a woman selling bread on a bicycle cart died when she was hit in the head by a falling coconut tree, a police report said.

In Taiwan on Thursday, the weather bureau issued wind and rain warnings for the southern part of the island, including the major port city of Kaohsiung where businesses and schools were closed and landslide warnings issued.

All domestic flights were suspended on the island while a handful of international flights were cancelled. Railway services between southern and eastern Taiwan were shut.

More than 4,000 people were evacuated as a precaution, mostly in the mountainous southern and eastern Taiwan, where nearly 0.7 metres of rainfall was recorded in some areas and up to one metre of rain was forecast.

The storm had cut power from more than 15,700 households across Taiwan, but the majority of them had since been restored.

“Typhoon Doksuri should not be underestimated,” Kaohsiung city mayor Chen Chi-mai said in a Facebook post late on Wednesday.

“The police and military force will assist in the effort of forced evacuation if needed,” he said, pointing to threats by torrential rain in mountainous areas.

The storm is expected to make landfall in southern China on Friday morning.

China’s National Meteorological Centre on Wednesday upgraded its typhoon warning alert from orange to red, the highest advisory among the four-tier colour-coded warning system.

Authorities also urged people to shore up on food, necessities and candles as a precautionary measure.

Doksuri would be the second typhoon to make landfall in China in less than two weeks after Talim slammed into Guangdong province on the evening of July 17.