In Wenzhou, 50-year-old Huang Xinghuan spent Saturday morning buying groceries at a traditional wet market, stocking two or three days of food and water before the stalls closed ahead of the storm. By nightfall, more than 1.8 million people across eastern China had been moved out of Typhoon Bavi’s path.
China evacuated that number across Zhejiang and neighboring Fujian provinces on Saturday, state media said, according to Reuters, as Bavi churned toward the port city of Wenzhou, home to roughly 10 million people, with landfall expected in the early hours of Sunday. The storm had already swept past northern Taiwan and lashed Japan’s southern Sakishima islands with heavy rain and violent wind.
Bavi’s maximum sustained winds had eased to 144 kph (90 mph), equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. As of 8:08 a.m. GMT Saturday, the storm sat about 200 km (124 miles) southeast of Wenling in Zhejiang, China’s National Meteorological Center said. Weakened or not, forecasters warned Bavi still carries enough moisture in its rain bands, spanning roughly the width of France, to trigger serious flooding once it comes ashore.
More than 1.7 million of the evacuees came from Zhejiang province alone, with another 100,000-plus moved out of Fujian. China’s weather agency issued an orange typhoon alert, the second-highest of four levels, as hundreds of flights were grounded, rail service was thinned out, and schools and ferries along the coast were suspended, according to Al Jazeera.
“I’m a little worried, but I think it’ll be OK. We’ve been through typhoons before. We’ll get through it.”
Huang Xinghuan, 50, Wenzhou resident
Huang said his family had stocked two to three days’ worth of water. “I think supplies are well guaranteed now. There’s no need to panic or stockpile a lot of food or other supplies,” he added.
Taiwan never took a direct hit; Bavi passed to the island’s north. But authorities weren’t taking chances. In a related round of closures reported earlier this week, more than 14,210 people were evacuated, mostly from mountainous stretches of Hualien and Taichung, as almost every city and county on the island declared a typhoon holiday, shutting offices and schools. Taiwan’s fire department counted 87 injuries by Saturday, most from falls off motorcycles and bicycles or people struck by flying debris. More than 920 international flights were canceled, effectively closing Taoyuan, the island’s main airport outside Taipei, along with all 282 domestic routes. The main north-south high-speed rail line kept running, just with reduced service.
In Taipei, 68-year-old Yeh Mao-hsiung shrugged off the fuss during his morning dog walk. “It’s OK, it’s not that serious,” he said. “It’s just a little bit more wind.” A few kilometers away in the hillside Beitou district, gusts near 100 kph knocked down trees and swelled rivers, a reminder the storm hadn’t finished with the island yet.
Japan’s Okinawa prefecture reported no deaths as Bavi’s outer bands pounded the Sakishima island chain with high waves and storm-surge warnings, though the disruption was real: more than 200 flights were canceled and thousands of households lost power.
Neither Japan nor Taiwan has reported a storm-related fatality so far. The same can’t be said elsewhere in the region. The Philippines has counted at least 17 deaths from heavy rains tied to an enhanced southwest monsoon that Bavi’s outer bands worsened. And after a brutal stretch of flooding and dam failures elsewhere in the country, parts of Hainan and Guangxi are still recovering from Tropical Storm Maysak, which killed at least 39 people in Nanning after a breached dam sent floodwater through the city.
Back in Wenzhou, the storm’s next stop, the mood was more practical than panicked. Chen Qiuqin, in her 60s, walked through steady rain toward her parents’ apartment Saturday afternoon, intent on bringing the flowerpots in from the balcony before the wind picked up. “My parents are both elderly and they’re home alone, so I wasn’t at ease,” she said. By the time Bavi reaches the coast early Sunday, it will be neighbors like her, not just the meteorologists, who decide how the city rides it out.
