Around 630,000 people have been affected in southeastern China by the arrival of Typhoon Gaemi, which triggered the country's first red alert of the year after causing five deaths and almost 700 injuries in Taiwan.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, 290,000 residents had to be temporarily displaced due to the storm, which hit Fujian province, in the southeast of the country, at around 7:50 pm local time (12:50 pm in Lisbon) on Thursday, with maximum winds of 118.8 kilometers per hour.
Between Wednesday morning and this morning, dozens of towns in Fujian recorded rainfall of more than 250 millimeters (mm), reaching, in some cases, 512.8 mm.
The typhoon is expected to move northwestward at about 20 kilometers per hour and weaken before reaching the neighboring province of Jiangxi on Friday afternoon. According to the storm tracking portal Zoom.earth, Gaemi had already weakened to tropical storm status, with winds of 75 kilometers per hour, by 12:30 local time (05:30 in Lisbon).
Ahead of the typhoon and flood season, which usually occurs in the last weeks of July and the first weeks of August, Chinese authorities have called for an intensification of prevention and rescue efforts.
Flooding is expected along major river basins, such as the Yellow River and the Yangtze, and landslides in mountainous areas.
In addition to the red alert issued by the Central Meteorological Observatory, the Chinese Ministry of Transport raised the emergency signal to the second highest level hours before Gaemi arrived.
In Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, all trains were suspended today, as were high-speed services departing to the province from Guangdong and Zhejiang. More than 200 passenger ships were also cancelled.
Taiwan's Central Meteorological Agency (CWA) today lifted the maritime and land warnings in force since Tuesday for the storm, which has so far caused five deaths and 688 injuries of varying degrees, the majority of which (228) were in the southern city of Kaohsiung.
According to data from the Central Emergency Operations Command (CEOC), more than 52,700 households remained without electricity in Taiwan today and another 24,000 without water supply, something that the island's leader, William Lai, promised to resolve in the coming hours.
Lai traveled to Kaohsiung this morning to see the impact of the typhoon on mountainous areas and announced subsidies of up to 20,000 Taiwanese dollars (around 561 euros) for families who suffered flooding from more than half a meter of water. As for the nine crew members of the Tanzanian cargo ship Fu Shun, which sank off Kaohsiung, authorities managed to rescue four of them, while the search for the other five continues. Although the worst of the typhoon has passed, the CWA maintains warnings of "extremely heavy" rainfall in the mountainous areas of central and southern Taiwan, where up to 1,800 millimeters of rainfall has accumulated since Tuesday.
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