Typhoons bring deaths and widespread disruption across East Asia

A series of intense storms has killed dozens across East Asia in recent months, according to the BBC, while typhoons have disrupted travel, forced mass evacuations and cut power to hundreds of thousands of households.

In October, Typhoon Champi brought heavy rain and winds to Taiwan without making landfall. By 24 October, Taiwan’s emergency operations centre had recorded one death and 616 injuries, most of them minor. The person who died was a man swept away by waves.

More than 340,000 households lost power during the storm, the centre said. At Taoyuan airport, 563 flights were cancelled on 23 October and another 261 the following day, according to the Associated Press.

In August, Typhoon Dolphin made landfall in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. Reuters reported that more than a million people were evacuated in eastern China and about 1,500 flights were cancelled in Shanghai. Heavy rain caused flooding in parts of the region.

Dolphin did not directly hit the Philippines, but helped intensify monsoon rains there, AP reported. A landslide in the northern city of Baguio killed ten people. The country’s civil defence office counted 19 deaths across nearly a week of torrential rain, flooding and a tropical storm in northern Luzon.

China’s emergency management ministry said typhoon disasters in August affected 365,900 hectares of farmland and left six people dead or missing. It described Dolphin as particularly damaging, but the figures cover all the month’s typhoon disasters, not Dolphin alone.

The storms have coincided with a strengthening El Niño, a natural climate pattern involving warm waters in the eastern Pacific and changes in winds that can affect weather around the world. The BBC reports that this year’s episode is likely to last until February or March.