| Shanghai braces for Haikui; 400,000 flee |
SHANGHAI/ BEIJING China rushed to evacuate more than 400,000 people on Tuesday as the most powerful typhoon since 2005 threatened the commercial hub of Shanghai, the government and state media said.
Typhoon Haikui was expected to make landfall in Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai, late on Tuesday or early on Wednesday, the China Meteorological Administration said.
Shanghai officials fear the storm could be the worst since 2005, when Typhoon Matsa killed seven people in the city, state media said.
The city aimed to move 200,000 people to more than a hundred shelters by Tuesday evening, government officials were quoted as saying.
The Shanghai government ordered outdoor construction sites shut down and cancelled summer classes for children until the typhoon had eased.
Authorities in Zhejiang were also rushing to
get people out the path
of the storm, with
256,000 residents of the province evacuated so
far, state media said.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the typhoon was about 270km southeast of Zhejiang and was forecast to land between the cities of Ningbo and Wenzhou, the China Meteorological Administration said.
The typhoon was packing winds of up to 151km per hour and could bring up to 400mm of rain to some areas, it said. The eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui would also be affected.
Shanghai had halted rail ticket sales for some coastal lines, which might be affected by the typhoon, state media said, while Zhejiang had called more than 30,000 ships back to port.
Also on Tuesday, China has pulled a Beijing newspaper from the newsstands after it criticised the official handling of July floods and said the government had underreported the death toll, a rights group said.
The government has been quick to censor criticism in state-run media, and Chinese Human Rights Defenders said this week’s edition of the Economic Observer had been pulled and the critical article deleted from the paper’s website.
The article focused on three men who were seen on July 21 being washed away by floodwaters in Beijing’s mountain resort town of Shidu and the subsequent search for them by their family and friends.
The family ordeal was contrasted with repeated statements by the township government that “no one died or was injured” in Shidu.
Agencies
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