Thousands flee as Typhoon Usagi hits north of the Philippines

“FORCED EVACUATIONS”

Elsewhere in Cagayan, officials worked in pouring rain Thursday to evacuate residents along the coasts and on the banks of already swollen rivers.

“Yesterday they were preventive evacuations. Now we are doing forced evacuations,” local disaster official Edward Gaspar told AFP by phone hours before landfall, adding that 1,404 residents were sheltering in a municipal gym.

Cagayan Civil Defense chief Rueli Rapsing said he expected local governments to move 40,000 people to shelters, about the same number who were preemptively evacuated in the run-up to Typhoon Yinxing, which hit Cagayan’s northern coast earlier this month.

He said more than 5,000 Cagayan residents were still in shelters after the previous storms as the Cagayan River, the country’s largest, remained swollen by heavy rains that fell in several provinces upstream.

OVERLAPPING TYPHHOONS

After Usagi, severe tropical storm Man-yi is expected to hit the densely populated capital Manila on Sunday.

This was similar to the trajectory of last month’s severe Tropical Storm Trami, which was responsible for most of the deaths in the recent swarm of weather disasters to hit the country.

Local officials were ordered to convince residents of communities prone to flooding and landslides in Man-yi’s path to move to shelters ahead of landfall on Friday, the civil defense agency said.

“Typhoons overlap. As soon as communities try to recover from the shock, the next tropical storm hits them again,” said Gustavo Gonzalez, UN humanitarian coordinator in the Philippines.

“In this context, response capacities are being exhausted and budgets are being depleted.”

According to a UN assessment of last month’s weather disasters, 207,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and almost 700,000 people sought temporary shelter.

Many families lacked even essentials such as sleeping mats, hygiene kits and cooking utensils, and had limited access to safe drinking water, the report said.

The storms have destroyed thousands of hectares of farmland and persistent flooding is likely to delay replanting efforts and worsen food supply problems, the report said.

Every year, about 20 major storms and typhoons strike the archipelago or surrounding waters, killing dozens of people and leaving millions in permanent poverty.

A recent study found that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are forming closer to coastlines, intensifying faster and lasting longer over land due to climate change.