MANILA: Typhoon Parma slammed into the northeastern Philippines on Saturday, killing four people, tearing roofs off houses, uprooting trees and bringing more devastation to the Asian country after last week’s deadly floods.
However, the typhoon veered away from Manila, sparing millions of people who were struggling to recover from massive rains that submerged most of the capital, claiming nearly 300 lives, last weekend.
Parma, packing winds of 175 km per hour and gusts of up to 210 km per hour, began lashing the northern province of Cagayan and surrounding areas about midday.
“The wind is very, very angry,” Cagayan regional police chief Roberto Damian said from his headquarters, about 400 km from the Philippine capital. “I can see trees are being toppled inside our camp.... One sturdy Narra tree was uprooted and smashed a car and a house. We cannot go out,” he said in a radio interview before his line went dead.
Cagayan is a mainly rural area with coastal towns and a population of just over a million people.
Parma caused major damage in Tuguegarao, the capital of Cagayan with a population of 130,000, according to the city’s mayor, Delfin Ting. “There’s massive destruction of rooftops, and trees have been toppled,” Ting said.
Other parts of the Philippines’ main island, Luzon, were being hit with heavy wind and rain. However, there were no immediate reports of casualties. Tens of thousands of people had already been evacuated from coastal and low-lying towns across northern Luzon in preparation for Parma.
Parma had previously been forecast to strike further south and closer to Manila, which is still reeling from the massive floods brought on by tropical storm Ketsana a week earlier.
Ketsana’s floods, the worst in 40 years, left 293 people dead and, of the more than three million people affected, about 400,000 remain in poorly supplied evacuation centers in and around Manila.
Vast parts of eastern Manila remain knee-deep in water, and residents remained nervous about the impact of any more rain.
Heavy showers fell across the sprawling city of 12 million people overnight Friday and throughout Saturday, but there was apparently not enough rain to greatly exacerbate the floods.
In Taiwan, people were also evacuated from their homes on Saturday as the island prepared to be hit by Parma after it left the Philippines. Residents of six villages in southern Taiwan’s Kaohsiung county, which was hit hardest by Typhoon Morakot in August, began evacuating from their mountain homes on Saturday, Taiwanese television reported.
Taiwan’s government, which was criticized for its slow and inefficient response to Morakot, which claimed more than 600 lives, this week issued mandatory evacuation orders for dangerous areas.
