BEIJING: Authorities evacuated nearly 300,000 people and suspended public transport across eastern China on Friday, as Typhoon Gaemi brought torrential rains already responsible for five deaths in nearby Taiwan.
Gaemi was the strongest typhoon to hit Taiwan in eight years when it made landfall on Thursday, flooding parts of the island’s second-biggest city.
It also exacerbated seasonal rains in the Philippines on its path to Taiwan, triggering flooding and landslides that killed 20 people.
A tanker carrying 1.4 million liters of oil sank off Manila on Thursday, with authorities racing to contain a fuel spill.
It had weakened by the time it made landfall in China’s eastern Fujian province shortly before 8:00 p.m. local time (1200 GMT) on Thursday, state media said.
China is enduring a summer of extreme weather, with heavy rains across the east and south coming as much of the north has sweltered under successive heatwaves.
The country is by far the world’s largest emitter of the greenhouse gases scientists say are driving climate change and making extreme weather more frequent and intense.
Chinese authorities warned Typhoon Gaemi was bringing with it torrential rains that could cause flooding.
They have relocated more than 290,000 people in Fujian and shut down public transport, offices, schools and markets in some cities.
In neighboring Zhejiang province, footage aired by state broadcaster CCTV Friday showed streets turned into rivers, trees strewn over roads and bikes struggling through knee-high waters.
The province’s Wenzhou city — home to nine million people — has issued its highest warning for rainstorms and evacuated nearly 7,000 people, CCTV said.
The typhoon will also bring heavy rainfall to central Jiangxi and Henan, state media said.
Guangdong, China’s most populous province, on Friday suspended some passenger train services ahead of the typhoon’s expected arrival, CCTV said.
Citing the official China Weather Network, the broadcaster said the typhoon was moving northwestward at about 20 kilometers per hour.
It will “gradually weaken” as it makes its way to Jiangxi on Friday late afternoon, it said.
No deaths or injuries have yet been reported.
The north of the country has this week also been hit by showers, with state media saying Friday that heavy rains had killed one and left three missing in the northwestern province of Gansu.
At a meeting of the country’s top leadership chaired by President Xi Jinping on Thursday, officials urged local authorities to stay “highly vigilant and proactive” as the country entered peak flooding season.
Typhoon Gaemi displaces nearly 300,000 in eastern China
https://arab.news/yd9t6
Typhoon Gaemi displaces nearly 300,000 in eastern China
- China is enduring a summer of extreme weather, with heavy rains across the east and south coming as much of the north has sweltered under successive heatwaves
A month on, flood-struck Aceh still reels from worst disaster since 2004 tsunami
- Aceh accounts for almost half of death toll in Sumatra floods that struck in November
- Over 450,000 remain displaced as of Friday, as governor extended state of emergency
JAKARTA: Four weeks since floodwaters and torrents of mud swept across Aceh province, villages are still overwhelmed with debris while communities remain inundated, forced to rely on each other to speed up recovery efforts.
The deadly floods and landslides, triggered by extreme weather linked to Cyclone Senyar, hit the provinces of North Sumatra, West Sumatra and Aceh in late November.
Aceh, the westernmost province of Indonesia, was the worst-hit. Accounting for almost half of the 1,137 death toll, a month later more than 450,000 people are still unable to return to their homes, as many struggle to access clean water, food, electricity and medical supplies.
“We saw how people resorted to using polluted river water for their needs,” Ira Hadiati, Aceh coordinator for the Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, or MER-C, told Arab News on Friday.
Many evacuation shelters were also lacking toilets and washing facilities, while household waste was “piling up on people’s lawns,” she added.
In many regions, people’s basic needs “were still unmet,” said Annisa Zulkarnain, a volunteer with Aceh-based youth empowerment organization Svara.
“Residents end up helping each other and that’s still nowhere near enough, and even with volunteers there are still some limitations,” she told Arab News.
Volunteers and aid workers in Aceh have grown frustrated with the central government’s response, which many have criticized as slow and ineffective.
And Jakarta continues to ignore persistent calls to declare the Sumatra floods a national disaster, which would unlock emergency funds and help streamline relief efforts.
“It seems like there’s a gap between the people and the government, where the government is saying that funds and resources have been mobilized … but the fact on the ground shows that even to fix the bridges, it’s been ordinary people working together,” Zulkarnain said.
After spending the past two weeks visiting some of the worst-affected areas, she said that the government “really need to speed up” their recovery efforts.
Aceh Gov. Muzakir Manaf extended the province’s state of emergency for another two weeks starting Friday, while several district governments have declared themselves incapable of managing the disasters.
Entire villages were wiped out by the disastrous floods, which have also damaged more than 115,000 houses across Aceh, along with 141 health facilities, 49 bridges, and over 1,300 schools.
The widespread damage to roads and infrastructure continue to isolate many communities, with residents traveling for hours on foot or with motorbikes in search of basic supplies.
“Even today, some areas are still inundated by thick mud and there are remote locations still cut off because the bridges collapsed. For access, off-road vehicles are still required or we would use small wooden boats to cross rivers,” Al Fadhil, director of Geutanyoe Foundation, told Arab News.
“From our perspective, disaster management this time around is much worse compared to how it was when the 2004 tsunami happened.”
When the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami struck in 2004, Aceh was the hardest-hit of all, with the disasters killing almost 170,000 people in the province.
But MER-C’s Hadiati said that the impact of the November floods and landslides is “more extensive and far worse than the tsunami,” as 18 Acehnese cities and regencies have been affected — about twice more than in the 2004 disaster.
As Friday marks 21 years since the cataclysmic tsunami, Fadhil said the current disaster management was “disorganized,” and lacked leadership and coordination from the central government, factors that played a crucial role after 2004.
“The provincial and district governments in Aceh, they’ve now done all they could with what they have,” he said.
“But their efforts stand against the fact that there’s no entry of foreign aid, no outside support, and a central government insisting they are capable.”
