The world’s strongest storm this year killed at least 16 people in the Philippines, with search and rescue underway a day after Typhoon Goni slammed the Southeast Asian nation Sunday.
As many as 390,000 people fled their homes and most are staying in evacuation centres, which include about 5,400 schools, authorities said in a briefing on Monday. Catanduanes, the province where the typhoon first made landfall, remains unreachable and an emergency team is on its way by air to establish communications.
Most of the fatalities were in Albay and Catanduanes provinces south of Manila, some of them swept away by raging waters, according to the region’s disaster risk-monitoring agency. One person drowned in Laguna, a province closer to the capital, and at least three were missing in Albay, the agency said in a statement late Sunday.
The super typhoon’s wind gusts peaked at 310 kilometres per hour Sunday, the weather bureau said. That’s equivalent to a category five hurricane. As of Monday, its winds had weakened to 65 kph as it heads to the South China Sea.
Six power plants are shut, and together with felled electric posts and damaged transmission lines, left 125 cities and towns without electricity. The power outage may lead to problems in the cold management of Covid-19 test kits and specimen, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said. He asked local government to deploy safety officers to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in evacuation centres.
Thirty-three airports, including Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, were cleared to resume flights at 10am Monday.
The storm damaged 1.1 billion pesos (about 715 million baht) worth of crops and affected the livelihood of 20,000 farmers, adding to the almost 2 billion pesos in damage when Typhoon Molave hit the country last week.
Goni moved away from the main Luzon Island Sunday night at a speed of 20 kph. Another storm, Atsani, may make landfall in the Philippines later this week, the weather bureau said.
An average of 20 cyclones pass through disaster-prone Philippines every year, which will likely complicate the nation’s fight against the coronavirus as thousands of people stay in cramped evacuation sites. In 2013, Haiyan struck the Southeast Asian nation and killed more than 6,300 people.
