Typhoon Dolphin slams China's coast as region endures busy storm season

Typhoon Dolphin made a double landfall on China's eastern coast in Zhejiang province on the evening of August 9, arriving as the most powerful storm to hit the country this year and triggering the highest level of typhoon alert issued by China's National Meteorological Center.

Landfall and mass evacuations

The storm first came ashore near Yuhuan in Taizhou with maximum sustained winds of roughly 151 kilometers per hour, or about 94 miles per hour, equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane, before making a second landfall in nearby Yueqing about 70 minutes later. Authorities evacuated more than a million people across the region, including roughly 900,000 residents relocated in the city of Wenzhou alone, where more than 1,000 emergency shelters were opened, along with about 390,000 people evacuated in Taizhou and tens of thousands more in Shanghai and neighboring Fujian province.

Coastal cities including Wenzhou, Taizhou and Ningbo activated Level I emergency response, the highest tier in China's four-level system, with Wenzhou ordering a citywide suspension of classes, work, production and transportation. Air travel across the region was badly disrupted, with Shanghai's Pudong and Hongqiao airports canceling more than 1,300 flights and Hangzhou's airport canceling nearly 400 more. Ferry and cruise services across Zhejiang and Fujian were suspended, and authorities in Fujian relocated construction crews and vessels away from offshore project sites as a precaution.

Search and rescue crews searched for a nine-year-old boy swept into the sea during the storm in the city of Wenling, according to local media. Forecasters warned that parts of Zhejiang could see 200 to 400 millimeters, or up to nearly 16 inches, of rain as Dolphin moved inland, raising the risk of flooding and landslides in mountainous areas. The storm continued tracking westward into central China in the days that followed, prompting Beijing to raise its own rainfall warnings and prepare to activate its flood control response.

Part of an unusually active season

Dolphin was the thirteenth named typhoon of the year in the northwest Pacific and the second storm this season to trigger China's highest-level red alert, following Typhoon Noul in late July. Forecasters have described the season as unusually active across the basin, in contrast to a comparatively quiet Atlantic hurricane season, with China, Japan and the Philippines all struck by separate storms in rapid succession earlier in the summer. The storm arrived within days of a separate tropical system that brought heavy rain to Hawaii, illustrating the wide geographic reach of this year's active Pacific storm pattern.