Typhoon Wipha Sparks Evacuations But Spares Shanghai

SHANGHAI, Sept. 19 — A powerful typhoon lashed at China’s east coast today, forcing gigantic evacuations in Shanghai and other coastal cities and causing widespread damage to the south of the city.
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An emergency shelter at a school on the outskirts of Shanghai today.
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As recently as late Tuesday, the storm, bearing the Thai-derived name Wipha, had been forecast to make a rare direct hit on Shanghai, China’s largest city, prompting the evacuation of 300,000 residents of low-lying neighborhoods and vulnerable areas, along with a battery of other emergency measures.

Schools were closed, scheduled matches for the women’s World Cup soccer tournament were postponed, and an annual tourism festival parade was canceled. Shanghai recorded heavy rains, with 6.8 inches reported by weather authorities, but in the end, the brunt of the typhoon was borne by neighboring Zhejiang Province, where one person was reported killed and an estimated six million people affected by the storm.

The typhoon made landfall at Cangnan County, near Wenzhou at 2:30 a.m., according to the Xinhua News Agency, destroying 669 houses, disrupting power supplies to nearly 2,000 villages, and causing an estimated $38 million in property losses.

After the storm came ashore, winds quickly dropped to under 70 miles per hour, ending fears that the storm could be the most powerful to hit the Chinese coast in 10 years did not materialize. By Wednesday morning, the system had been downgraded to a tropical storm.

“The government relocated about 4,000 people and moved about 300 people into five specially established refugee camps,” said Lin Guanzhen, the director party and political affairs of Cangnan County. “After the Typhoon Saomai in 2006, the government built new residential buildings to relocate impacted refugees. So, this time, most of our people who live in the new residential districts were not influenced, and to my knowledge, there were no serious injuries or deaths here.”

The 2006 storm, which battered the same general area of China’s south-central coastline, was a major embarrassment for authorities, perhaps explaining the extraordinary precautions taken for Wipha.

Last year’s typhoon, billed as one of the most powerful in memory, killed 178 people and destroyed seaside villages and fishing fleets throughout the region. Provincial officials were late in organizing an emergency response, and initially played down the toll from the storm. Day-after reports claimed that only 17 people had died.

Villagers who experienced both typhoons shrugged off this week’s storm.

“It was pretty dangerous yesterday when the typhoon struck,” said Ye Sizhao, a villager who lives in the county. “We were lucky that everyone, about 1,400 people altogether, had already been moved out of the village. When the rain and the wind were strongest, tiles on the roof were blown up in the sky, and as far as I know two houses collapsed during the night.”
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