Typhoon Ragasa races towards Chinese coast as death toll climbs

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Typhoon Ragasa has left more than a dozen dead in Taiwan and the Philippines and a trail of destruction in Hong Kong as one of the year’s strongest storms raced towards the southern Chinese coast.

The typhoon, which recorded maximum sustained wind speeds of 175km an hour on Wednesday afternoon, inundated low-lying areas of Hong Kong overnight. In Taiwan, 14 people were killed and 152 were missing, while four were reported killed in the Philippines.

Authorities in Guangdong, the southern Chinese province bordering Hong Kong, took precautionary measures, including evacuating nearly 1.9mn people, according to the Chinese Communist party’s official People’s Daily.

China’s meteorological administration forecast that Ragasa would make landfall on Wednesday evening or night between the southern cities of Zhanjiang and Yangjiang, before moving south-west towards northern Vietnam.

Ragasa’s slowing wind speeds meant the storm was downgraded on Wednesday from a super to a severe typhoon, according to the Hong Kong Observatory. Overnight, the observatory had raised its highest level storm warning.

Across Hong Kong, strong waves flooded coastal areas overnight, with seawater crashing into promenade restaurants and the lobby of a luxury hotel. The storm surge caused sea levels to rise more than 1.5 metres, the observatory said.

In nearby gambling hub Macau, about 16,000 households in low-lying areas experienced power cuts.

School classes have been suspended and hundreds of flights were cancelled in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and parts of Guangdong.

Videos posted on the social media platform Xiaohongshu also showed flooding in Zhuhai. The Financial Times was not able to independently verify the videos.

Taiwan did not suffer a direct hit from the typhoon, but was lashed with torrential rains for more than 48 hours.

Casualties were concentrated in remote eastern Hualien county, where a barrier lake formed by a previous landslide in the central mountain range collapsed, triggering a flash flood in the county’s valley that inundated the rural town of Guangfu and washed away residents and cars.

The barrier lake had long been expected to overflow, but the government had only ordered evacuation of some small villages on the upstream riverbank and not prepared for widespread flooding in the main valley.

Premier Cho Jung-tai, visiting the disaster area, ordered an investigation into evacuation preparations for the storm, as the fire department and military continued search and rescue operations on Wednesday.

In the Philippines, at least four deaths and 11 injuries were reported, according to the state-run Philippine News Agency, which said the toll was still being verified.