100,000 Chinese evacuated

A POWERFUL typhoon ploughed into a densely populated area of southern China on Wednesday, prompting the state Meteorological Administration to issue an 'urgent red alert', its highest-level warning.
Authorities evacuated more than 100,000 people before typhoon Hagupit made landfall around dawn. The storm killed at least eight people in the Philippines earlier in the week.

Streets were deserted and shops and businesses shuttered as the storm uprooted trees and brought down billboards in cities across the booming southern Chinese province of Guangdong, including Maoming where the centre of the storm made landfall.

The state news agency Xinhua said a fishing boat sank but no casualties were reported.

It described typhoon Hagupit as 'the worst to hit Guangdong in more than a decade', but it was not clear by what gauge it was measuring the storm when typhoons in the past have triggered heavy death tolls.

Hagupit whipped past Hong Kong overnight, uprooting trees and causing flash floods in low-lying areas including Lantau island where the city's airport is located, with dozens of people injured across the territory.

More than 50,000 vessels had been called back to port and authorities in Guangdong, the manufacturing hub of China, Xinhua news said.

Torrential rain and more flooding was forecast. Hagupit would also hit Guangxi, to the west of Guangdong, and the tropical resort island of Hainan, authorities said.

Flights in Hong Kong were disrupted on Tuesday night, stranding scores of passengers in the airport.

Tropical storms in the region gather intensity from the warm ocean waters and frequently develop into typhoons that hit Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and southern China during a season that lasts from early summer to late autumn.

Another storm was brewing to the east of the Philippines.

Website Tropical Storm Risk said the storm, named 'nineteen', was expected to strengthen and head west towards China, following a similar path to Hagupit.

In China's quake-hit province of Sichuan, 14 people are missing after landslides triggered by heavy rain, Xinhua quoted a local official as saying.

Heavy rain, not related to the typhoon, also hit the Tangjiashan area, blocking the sluice of the dangerous 'quake lake', formed by mudslides blocking valleys, and raising its water level by five metres.

The lake was formed during the May 12 quake in which more than 80,000 people died.