HONG KONG -- Typhoon Mangkhut barreled into southern China on Sunday, killing two people after lashing the Philippines with strong winds and heavy rain that left at least 69 people dead and dozens more feared buried in landslides.
More than 2.4 million people had been evacuated in southern China's Guangdong province by Sunday evening to flee the typhoon, and nearly 50,000 fishing boats were called back to port, state media reported. It threatened to be the strongest typhoon to hit Hong Kong in nearly two decades.
"Prepare for the worst," Hong Kong Security Minister John Lee Ka-chiu urged residents.
That warning came after Mangkhut's devastating march through the northern Philippines, where the storm made landfall Saturday on Luzon island with sustained winds of 127 mph and gusts of 158 mph.
Meteorologists have called Mangkhut the world's most powerful storm of 2018, with a span as wide as 550 miles and wind gusts that hit 200 mph last week. At its peak, the typhoon was equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.
Police Superintendent Pelita Tacio said 34 villagers had died and 36 remained missing in landslides in two villages in Itogon town in the northern Philippine mountain province of Benguet.
Itogon Mayor Victorio Palangdan told The Associated Press by phone that at the height of the typhoon's onslaught Saturday afternoon, dozens of people, mostly miners and their families, rushed into an old three-story building in the village of Ucab.
The building -- a former mining bunkhouse that had been transformed into a chapel -- was obliterated when part of a mountain slope collapsed. Three villagers who managed to escape told authorities what happened.
"They thought they were really safe there," the mayor said. He expressed sadness that the villagers, many of them poor, had few options to survive in a region where big corporations have profited immensely from gold mines.
Rescuers were scrambling to pull the body of a victim from the mound of mud and rocks in Ucab before Tacio, the police official, left the area Sunday.
"I could hear villagers wailing in their homes near the site of the accident," Tacio said.
Rescuers for the Itogon landslide were hampered by rain and mud. The search and rescue operation was suspended at nightfall and was to resume at daybreak today, said Palangdan. Police and their vehicles could not immediately reach the landslide-hit area because the ground was unstable and soaked from the heavy rains, regional police chief Rolando Nana told the ABS-CBN TV network.
Overall, at least 64 people have died in typhoon-related incidents in the northern Philippines, mostly from landslides and collapsed houses, according to the national police. Forty-five other people were missing and 33 were injured in the storm.
Four members of the Allaga family were buried alive when their mountain home was deluged by a landslide in Nueva Vizcaya. The family had sent three of their children to an evacuation center, but the father, Gilbert Allaga, stayed behind with the youngest siblings to care for their livestock, said Francis Tolentino, who is leading the government relief operation.
"If you have to choose between your life or your animals, you should choose your life," Tolentino said.
The hardest-hit area was Benguet province, where 38 people died, mostly in the two landslides in Itogon, and 37 are missing, the police said.
Still, the Philippines appeared to have been spared the high number of casualties many had feared. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan left more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattened villages and displaced more than 5 million in the central Philippines. A massive evacuation of about 87,000 people from high-risk areas helped lessen potential casualties, officials said.
In the days before Mangkhut made landfall in the Philippines, local authorities went door to door in vulnerable neighborhoods to encourage residents to evacuate.
The typhoon struck at the start of the rice and corn harvesting season in the Philippines' northern breadbasket, prompting farmers to scramble to save what they could of their crops, Cagayan Gov. Manuel Mamba said.
The fertile farmland is a favored path of typhoons, which gather strength over the western Pacific and pummel their way across the Philippines toward China.
Five percent of local budgets are dedicated to calamity funds -- and they rarely go unused. "There are a lot of calamities here," said Rewin Valenzuela, the leader of the Bangan community in Sanchez-Mira. "It's the Philippines."
HONG KONG
In China, Mangkhut continued its destructive path, with Hong Kong bracing for a storm that could be the strongest to hit the city since Typhoon York in 1999.
A video posted online by residents showed the top corner of an old building break and fall off, while in another video, a tall building swayed as strong winds blew.
The storm shattered glass windows on commercial skyscrapers in Hong Kong, sending sheets of paper pouring out of the buildings, fluttering and spiraling as they headed for the debris-strewn ground, according to several videos posted on social media.
Mangkhut also felled trees, tore bamboo scaffolding off buildings under construction and flooded some areas of Hong Kong with waist-high waters, according to the South China Morning Post.
The paper said the heavy rains brought storm surges of 10 feet around Hong Kong.
The storm made landfall in the Guangdong city of Taishan at 5 p.m., packing wind speeds of 100 mph. State television broadcaster CGTN reported that surging waves flooded a seaside hotel in the city of Shenzhen.
China's state television reported that at least two people had been killed in the province.
In Macau, next door to Hong Kong, casinos were ordered to close from 11 p.m. Saturday, the first time such action was taken in the city, the South China Morning Post reported. In the city's inner harbor district, the water level reached 5 feet on Sunday and was expected to rise further. The area was one of the most affected by floods from Typhoon Hato, which left 10 people dead last year.
Authorities in southern China issued a red alert, the most severe warning, as the national meteorological center said the densely populated region would face a "severe test caused by wind and rain" and urged officials to prepare for possible disasters.
Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific said all of its flights would be canceled between 2:30 a.m. Sunday and 4 a.m. today. The city of Shenzhen also canceled all flights between Sunday and early this morning. Hainan Airlines canceled 234 flights in the cities of Haikou, Sanya, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai scheduled over the weekend.
Almost 1,000 flights were canceled or delayed. The outdoor sections of the city's vaunted subway system were taken out of service.
Airports and high-speed railways in Guangdong, too, were shut down, throttling traffic in one of world's most urbanized and densely populated regions, with 100 million people. By midday, most bridges in the province, which stretches southwest toward Hainan Island, were closed. Schools in the province, along with those in Hong Kong and Macau, have been ordered closed today, when the storm's effects were expected to linger.
There were no reports of deaths in Hong Kong, but by late afternoon Sunday, 213 people had sought medical treatment, according to a government statement. More than 1,000 people sought refuge in 48 temporary shelters.
As the storm reached the mainland Sunday evening, cities along China's southern coast seemed eerily vacant, with residents mostly heeding warnings to stay indoors. As in Hong Kong, they had stockpiled water and basic foods Saturday and Sunday, emptying stores.
Guangzhou, the region's capital and largest city, ordered all restaurants closed to keep people off the streets. Xinhua, China's official news agency, citing government reports, said that nearly 2.5 million people in the province had been affected in some way, with some seeking protection in more than 18,000 designated shelters.
Tens of thousands of fishing boats -- fishing is a main part of the region's economy, along with chemical and steel works -- were ordered to port before the storm. Authorities detained several fishermen who had defied warnings and put to sea anyway.
The Hong Kong Observatory warned people to stay away from steep hills and retaining walls and issued evacuation notices to residents living in areas prone to landslides.
On Sunday, most residents hunkered down in their apartments, while those in more flood-prone areas took refuge in shelters.
In the eastern Hong Kong neighborhood of Heng Fa Chien, residents of a flooded housing complex linked arms and held hands as they waded knee-deep through pools of rainwater in streets, parking lots and stores.
"Heng Fa Chuen has become a water reservoir," May Siu, a longtime resident, said. "I've lived here 30 years, and these storms only started looking like this with Hato last year."
Information for this article was contributed by Vincent Yu, Jim Gomez, Aaron Favila, Joeal Calupitan and Gillian Wong of The Associated Press; and by Gerry Mullany, Tiffany May, Steven Lee Myers and Hannah Beech of The New York Times.
A Section on 09/17/2018