Taiwan evacuates 3,000 as Typhoon Fung-wong approaches

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TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan evacuated more than 3,000 people on Tuesday, issuing a land warning for the arrival of Typhoon Fung-wong, which is expected to dump large volumes of rain on its mountainous east coast, recently lashed by another typhoon.

The weakening Fung-wong is forecast to hit land on Wednesday on the island’s southwestern coast around the major port of Kaohsiung, after it killed 18 people while powering through the Philippines as a much stronger system.

“Fung-wong may have been downgraded to a weak typhoon, but we still cannot lower our guard,” Chen Chi-mai, the city’s mayor, told reporters.

On his Facebook page, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te urged people to keep clear of the mountains, the coast and other potentially dangerous areas. 

The transport ministry said 66, mostly domestic, flights were cancelled on Tuesday.

Fung-wong is expected to cross the bottom part of Taiwan and enter the Pacific Ocean along the coast of the sparsely populated eastern counties of Taitung and Hualien.

A typhoon in September unleashed flooding that killed 18 people in Hualien.

The government, which has ordered evacuations in the town of Guangfu, the scene of those deadly floods, said 3,337 people in four counties and cities had been moved to safer areas.

Hualien closed schools and offices on Tuesday, as did the neighbouring county of Yilan.

The typhoon will not directly affect the northern city of Hsinchu, home to TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker.

Most deaths in the Philippines were caused by landslides in its mountainous northern Cordilleras, senior civil defence official Raffy Alejandro told a briefing, with two people reported missing and 28 injured. 

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Mikhail Flores in Manila; Editing by Stephen Coates and Clarence Fernandez)