Typhoon Yagi leaves at least 4 dead and scores injured in Vietnam

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Vietnamese authorities say Typhoon Yagi has killed at least four people and injured 78 others after making landfall Saturday afternoon in the north of the country. Yagi, described by Vietnamese meteorological officials as “one of the most powerful typhoons in the region over the past decade,” made its way to the Southeast Asian country after it left three people dead and nearly a hundred others injured in the Chinese province of Hainan. The typhoon landed at Vietnam’s coastal provinces of Quang Ninh and Haiphong with wind speeds of up to 149 kilometers per hour (92 miles per hour), state media reported. Before landing, strong winds felled a tree, killing a woman in the capital, Hanoi, local media said Saturday. Authorities pruned trees in Hanoi to make them less susceptible to falling, but wind and rain knocked over several along with billboards in northern cities. “But we still need to be prepared.” On Friday afternoon, Yagi struck the Chinese city of Wenchang in Hainan province with wind speeds of up to about 245 kph (152 mph) near its center. It has affected over 1.2 million people as of noon Saturday, according to the local Global Times newspaper. Meanwhile, the meteorological observatory of the city of Haikou downgraded its typhoon signal from red to orange on Saturday, as it moved further away. Before leaving Hong Kong, Yagi forced more than 270 people to seek refuge at temporary government shelters on Friday, and over 100 flights in the city were canceled due to the typhoon. Yagi was still a storm when it blew out of the northwestern Philippines into the South China Sea on Wednesday, leaving at least 20 people dead and 26 others missing mostly in landslides and widespread flooding and affecting more than 2.3 million people in northern and central provinces. More than 82,200 people were displaced from their homes in Philippine provinces, and classes, work, inter-island ferry services and domestic flights were disrupted for days, including in the densely populated capital region, metropolitan Manila. Benjamin Horton, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore said that storms like typhoon Yagi were “getting stronger due to climate change, primarily because warmer ocean waters provide more energy to fuel the storms, leading to increased wind speeds and heavier rainfall.” Climate change was also causing storms to potentially move to different locations with studies by the observatory showing that the latitude where storms peaked in their intensity was shifting, exposing newer areas to the impacts of storms, he added. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://apnews.com/555e6187e737da7b13fe3e31cf3797ba