TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — A typhoon killed three people in Taiwan as it approached the island on Wednesday, while people trapped by rising floodwaters in the Philippines called for help in the Southeast Asian nation where at least 13 died.
Taiwan’s Central News Agency said more than 220 other people were injured as Typhoon Gaemi gathered strength and brought strong winds and heavy rain.
Schools, offices and tourist sites closed across Taiwan, while air travelers rushed to board overseas flights. Airlines said many flights to Japan, China and other regional destinations would be canceled on Thursday. No trains will operate until 3 p.m., the Central News Agency reported.
Fishing boats were recalled to port amid turbulent seas. High winds knocked down some pedestrians and riders of the island’s ubiquitous motor scooters. Shelters were opened in vulnerable areas, particularly in Taiwan’s mountainous center and east that are prone to landslides and flooding. Streets were inundated in numerous towns and cities.
The three deaths included a driver pinned under his excavator after it overturned on a slippery road, a woman hit by a falling tree and a woman crushed in a car by a collapsing wall, the Central News Agency said.
The storm prompted the cancellation of air force drills off Taiwan’s east coast.
Gaemi, called Carina in the Philippines, did not make landfall in that archipelago but enhanced its seasonal monsoon rains. They set off at least a dozen landslides and floods over five days, killing at least eight and displacing 600,000 people, the country’s disaster risk mitigation agency said.
The bodies of a pregnant woman and three children were dug out Wednesday morning after a landslide buried a rural shanty in the mountainside town of Agoncillo in Batangas province. A rice porridge vendor was hit by a falling tree in another Batangas town Tuesday night.
A spokesperson for the Philippine coast guard, Rear Admiral Armando Balilo, said they have been overwhelmed with pleas from residents in the capital to be rescued. Some waited on rooftops.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordered authorities to speed up efforts to deliver food and other aid to isolated rural villages. “People there may not have eaten for days,” Marcos said in a televised emergency meeting.
In the densely populated region around the Philippine capital, government work and school classes were suspended after rains flooded many areas.
In Marikina city in the eastern fringes of the Manila region, strong currents on a major river swept away a steel cargo container, refrigerators and tree trunks, according to Associated Press journalists at the scene.
“Stay calm. We’re doing everything we can. The local government won’t leave you behind,” Mayor Jeannie Sandoval of Malabon, speaking on the DZRH radio network, told one alarmed mother.
The Philippine coast guard said more than 350 passengers and cargo truck drivers and workers were stranded in seaports after ferries and cargo ships were prohibited from venturing into rough seas.
The storm’s effects were expected to continue into Friday as it moved in a northwestern direction toward mainland China. In Fujian province on China’s east coast, ferry routes were suspended on Wednesday and all train service will be halted on Thursday, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said.
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Associated Press journalists Jim Gomez and Joeal Calupitan in Manila, Philippines, and Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.
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