Filipino residents took shelter inside a temporary evacuation shelter in Mambaling village as typhoon Hagupit was expected to make landfall Saturday night. Credit Jay Rommel Labra/European Pressphoto Agency
CEBU, the Philippines — Typhoon Hagupit began battering the Philippines late Saturday, with strong winds and rain expected to pummel a central belt of the island nation for days as the storm churns westward.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been evacuated from dangerous coastal areas ahead of its landfall. While weaker than the devastating typhoon that killed more than 7,000 people in November last year, Hagupit is the most powerful storm to hit the country in 2014.
The typhoon made landfall by 9:15 p.m. near the town of Dolores on eastern Samar Island, Philippine government forecasters said. The storm had weakened somewhat as it approached land, with maximum sustained winds of 108 miles per hour near its center on Saturday afternoon, according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration. It was expected to bring heavy rain and winds to a 350-mile-wide swath of the country.
One major concern is that the typhoon is forecast to take up to three days to grind its way across the central Philippines, dumping heavy rains over a wide area and raising the possibility of deadly landslides.
On Saturday, the United States Joint Typhoon Warning Center downgraded Hagupit from “super typhoon†status, and the Japan Meteorological Agency also lowered its designation from the highest level, “violent,†to “very strong.†Those assessments had also fluctuated on Friday. The monitoring site Tropical Storm Risk said Hagupit would probably come ashore as a Category 3 storm.
Last year, Typhoon Haiyan passed relatively quickly over the Philippines, sparing it extensive landslides that usually are among the biggest dangers of typhoons in the nation. But a storm surge sent a wall of water across low-lying coastal areas in Tacloban, toppling houses and flooding schools that were used as emergency shelters.
Storm surges as high as 17 feet were blamed for more than 90 percent of the deaths and injuries last year in Tacloban and in Palo and Tanauan. Experts have said that more extensive evacuations could have saved many lives.
The storm surge from Hagupit could reach as high as 15 feet, the government has warned. In recent days, more than 500,000 people have been evacuated from vulnerable coastal areas, the social welfare secretary, Dinky Soliman, said at a news conference on Friday in Manila. On Friday, further evacuations were ordered in Albay, a province in the storm’s projected path where people living in coastal areas and below the Mayon volcano are considered to be at risk of storm surges and landslides, according to local news reports.
The worst of the storm appears likely to pass to the north of Tacloban and other areas that were devastated in 2013, according to maps produced by Philippine meteorologists. Many people are still living in temporary shelters there, and emergency shelters have not been fully rebuilt.
“People are very, very nervous,†said Idalia Amaya, the acting program manager for Catholic Relief Services’ shelter program in Tacloban. “It’s just after the one-year anniversary, so people are very traumatized. So they’re taking it very seriously. A lot of families lost loved ones, and everyone was impacted.â€
Concern remains about the damage the typhoon could wreak if it passes near Manila, with its millions of residents and notoriously bad drainage. The United States Joint Typhoon Warning Center is forecasting that the storm will pass near the capital, but the official storm-monitoring services of the Philippines and Japan indicate that Hagupit will take a more southerly path.
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