A second typhoon in a week is barreling into the Philippines, with more than 900,000 residents warned to flee the looming destructive winds and life-threatening storm surges.
Fung-wong, known locally as Uwan, follows on the heels of Typhoon Kalmaegi, which killed almost 200 people in the central part of the archipelago nation, as well as five people in Vietnam.
Almost 920,000 residents were evacuated from 11 regions on Sunday, according to the country’s Presidential Communications Office.
“People are a little shellshocked,” Butch Meily, president of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (PDRF), told CNN, noting this marks the country’s fourth major typhoon, in addition to two earthquakes, within the past seven weeks.
“We’re getting ready, but this is starting to test our level of experience.”
Fung-wong is forecast to make landfall from Sunday evening local time, striking eastern and northern areas, including Luzon – the nation’s most populous island, home to Manila – as well as the Visayas islands and Siargao, known as the country’s surfing capital.
However, its destructive winds have already caused damage in Catanduanes province as it approached, according to Meily.
“We’re in red alert,” the Philippines’ Social Welfare Secretary, Rex Gatchalian, told CNN Newsroom.
Thousands of families are already sheltering in gymnasiums, theaters, and government facilities, and the government is providing food and essentials, Gatchalian said.
“For families who are still in their homes, they’re being forcibly evacuated already,” he added.
Recovery efforts have been interrupted in Kalmaegi-stricken Cebu and Davao to the south, to concentrate all available resources on preparing for Fung-wong, including a 24-hour operation center near the capital Manila, said
Meily of the PDRF, a central private-sector coordinator for disaster response.
“But our funds are starting to get exhausted because of the number of emergencies,” he added.
The country’s meteorological agency, PAGASA, has upgraded Fung-wong to a super typhoon on its intensity scale, recording maximum wind speeds of 185 kph (115 mph) and gusts of 230 kph (143 mph).
However, it remains below the super-typhoon threshold on more widely used scales like that of the US Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which requires winds exceeding 240 kph (150 mph).
The typhoon’s massive circulation, spanning 1,500 km (932 miles), was already lashing parts of the region with heavy rain and winds on Saturday, said PAGASA forecaster Benison Estareja, according to Reuters.
“It can cover almost the entire country,” Estareja said.
Landslides and severe flooding are expected along Luzon’s east coast, with more than 200 mm of rainfall in the next 24 hours.
Manila is also forecast to face heavy rain and a high risk of flooding, with up to 200 mm of rainfall, according to the country’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
More than 300 domestic and international flights have been canceled, according to the Philippines’ Civil Aviation Authority.
The Philippines is no stranger to typhoons, and Fung-wong is the 21st named storm to impact the country this year, according to local officials.
Its predecessor, Kalmaegi, left a trail of death and devastation as it tore through the central Philippines on Tuesday, reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble and displacing tens of thousands of people.
At least 188 people were killed, most in Cebu province, a tourist hotspot, local authorities said.
Noting the back-to-back calamities afflicting the country, the PDRF’s Meily said he had recently been in Cebu, where he had witnessed the aftermath of a 6.9-magnitude earthquake and felt a second one hit.
“While I was there, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake started shaking the building we were in,” he said. “After I left, they got hit by Typhoon Kalmaegi.”
Though not the strongest storm to hit, Kalmaegi was slow-moving and dumped huge volumes of water over highly populated areas. Officials said most people died from drowning.
Clogged waterways exacerbated its impact in an already flood-prone area, and an apparent lack of understanding of early warnings, Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV, deputy administrator of the Philippines’ Office of Civil Defense, told local media.
The Philippines is one of Asia’s most flood-prone countries, but this year it has also been mired in a massive corruption scandal involving flood control projects, which has brought thousands of protesters onto the streets.
Dozens of legislators, senators, and construction companies have been accused of receiving kickbacks with money intended for thousands of flood control projects.
Scientists have long warned that the human-caused climate crisis – for which industrialized nations bear greater historical responsibility – has only exacerbated the scale and intensity of regional storms that disproportionately impact populations in the Global South.
