Asia’s strongest storm this year, Super Typhoon Yagi, made landfall in northern Vietnam on Saturday, the meteorological agency said, killing at least four people after tearing through China’s island of Hainan and the Philippines.
Super Typhoon Yagi hit island districts of north Vietnam at about 1pm (0600 GMT), generating winds of up to 160kph (99mph) near its centre, having lost power from its peak of 234kph (145mph) in Hainan a day earlier.
The government said that, as of 5pm, four people had died and 78 had been injured by the typhoon. At least another dozen were missing at sea, according to state media.
Yagi had already claimed the lives of at least two people in Hainan and 16 people in the Philippines, the first country it hit, having formed east of the archipelago earlier in the week.
The storm triggered widespread power outages.
Vietnam’s coastal city of Haiphong, an industrial hub with a population of 2 million people that hosts factories for foreign multinationals and local carmaker VinFast, was among the hardest-hit by winds with speeds of up to 90kph.
In Haiphong the strong winds smashed windows, and waves were as much as three metres high when they hit the coast, according to a Reuters witness.
Metal roofing sheets were blown away, pictures and footage on local media showed. The government said thousands of trees had fallen and many houses were damaged across northern Vietnam.
Earlier in Hainan, which has a population of more than 10 million, the storm felled trees, flooded roads and cut power to more than 800,000 homes.
Vietnam evacuated more than 50,000 people from coastal towns and deployed 450,000 military personnel, the government said.
It also suspended operations for several hours at four airports on Saturday, including Hanoi’s Noi Bai, the busiest in the north, which cancelled more than 300 flights.
High schools were also closed in 12 northern provinces, including in the capital Hanoi, which has a population of 8.5 million.
Authorities in the capital suspended public transport on buses and its two elevated metro lines on Saturday afternoon, state media reported. The meteorological agency has warned of risks of heavy flooding in the city centre.
A Hanoi resident, Nguyen Manh Quan, 40, said: “The wind is strong enough to blow a person over.” Dang Van Phuong, also 40, said: “I’ve never seen a storm like this, you can’t drive in these winds.”
Packing maximum sustained winds of 234kph near its centre, Yagi registers as the world’s second-most powerful tropical cyclone so far this year – after the category-5 Atlantic Hurricane Beryl – and the most severe of 2024 in the Pacific basin.
After more than doubling in strength since killing 16 people in the northern Philippines earlier this week, Yagi slammed into the city of Wenchang in Hainan on Friday afternoon.
A little more than an hour after Yagi’s arrival, Hainan experienced power outages that affected 830,000 households in the province, the official news agency Xinhua said.
Formed over the warm seas east of the Philippines, Yagi arrived in China as a category-4 typhoon, ushering in winds strong enough to overturn vehicles, uproot trees and severely damage roads, bridges and buildings.
Typhoons are becoming stronger, fuelled by warmer oceans amid climate change, scientists say. Last week, Typhoon Shanshan slammed into south-western Japan, the strongest storm to hit the country in decades.
Yagi is named after the Japanese word for goat and the constellation of Capricornus.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
