A woman in downtown Shanghai on Monday braves lashing rain and winds from Typhoon Bebinca which caused widespread damage and dumped 10 inches of rain after scoring a direct hit on China’s financial capital overnight. Photo by Alex Plavevski/EPA-EFE
Sept. 16 (UPI) — Chinese authorities evacuated more than 400,000 people overnight as the most powerful typhoon in the modern history of the country bore down on the Shanghai Metropolitan area closing airports and disrupting rail and road transport during the busy Moon Festival travel period.
Another 9,000 people were relocated to safety from Chongming Island in the Yangtze River delta as Typhoon Bebinca came ashore near Lingang New City 40 miles southeast of Shanghai on Monday at around 7:30 a.m. local time packing winds of 94 mph, said China Meteorological Administration.
The 25 million residents of the country’s financial center were ordered to stay home as Bebinca dumped three inches of rain in an hour Monday morning.
All flights, trains and ferries were canceled, highways either closed or traffic restricted to 25 mph, the Shanghai Disneyland, Jinjiang Amusement and Shanghai Wild Animal parks were shut and parades celebrating the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival were canceled.
Footage circulating online showed uprooted trees, submerged streets and advertising billboards being torn down by the wind while people posted about stuck in their hotels on social media.
The disruption will likely negatively impact badly needed spending after new National Bureau of Statistics figures published at the weekend showed the economy continuing to slow in August amid weak domestic demand with lackluster performances from the retail sector as well as industrial production and property.
The city of Nanjing, 185 miles inland in neighboring Jiangsu province, canceled all major events, halted construction and closed the Yangtze to shipping.
Bebinca is expected to weaken as it tracks west-northwestward across southern Jiangsu Province and be downgraded to a tropical storm.
Modeling shows it weakening further into a tropical depression and fizzling out as it moves over Anhui Province through the end of Tuesday.
Shanghai is normally well out of the danger zone for tropical storms, with typhoons typically coming ashore in Hainan, Guangdong and Guangxi provinces many hundreds of miles to the south.
However, meteorological authorities warned of the threat of another typhoon originating in the same area of the Pacific Ocean as Bebinca, east of the Philippines, which zigzagged the region battering Taiwan and southern Japan before tracking west toward China.