Agence France Presse

Shanghai, July 19:

Nearly one million people were evacuated as Typhoon Haitang raced towards mainland China today after tearing through Taiwan, where two people were killed and two feared dead from the storm. Haitang slowed after ploughing into Taiwan, causing millions of dollars of damage yesterday, but is still expected to lash east and southeast China with ferocity. The first storm of the season is approaching the mainland, packing winds of up to 119 kilometres per hour and gusts of 160 kilometres per hour. At 0715 GMT, it had yet to make landfall, but officials at the Fujian flood control and drought relief office said the eye of the typhoon would likely hit the city of Quanzhou soon. Frantic round-the-clock preparations that began yesterday have seen volunteers and 5,000 armed police mobilised to evacuate people to higher ground, reports said. In Fujian, 539,000 people had been moved to safety, while 25,000 ships had taken shelter in provincial harbours, the Fujian Flood Relief Office said on its website. Just north in Zhejiang province, over 320,000 people have been evacuated, while on the border between the provinces authorities warned of landslides and mud-rock flows and police shut down expressways.

In the Fujianese provincial capital of Fuzhou over one million mobile phone text messages were sent reminding residents to heed precautions, Xinhua news agency said. Flights meanwhile were cancelled in the cities of Fuzhou and Quanzhou, both expected to bear the brunt of the storm, though air traffic was reported as normal in Xiamen. In neighbouring Shanghai skies grew dark with winds gusting up to 74 kilometres an hour. As many as 100,000 households were still without electricity today, and some highways remained blocked by landslides. A 65-year-old man was killed by a falling rock in central Taiwan while a 63-year-old woman drowned after falling into a river in Taipei. Two others were missing and feared dead while 29 were injured in storm-related accidents. In an unrelated storm, eight people died and four were missing in the central Chinese province of Hebei.