Residents wade in a flooded bridge over a swollen river due to heavy rains in Ilagan town, Isabela province north of Manila on October 31, 2020, ahead of Typhoon Goni's landfall in the Philippines. / AFP / Villamor Visaya
About a million people were evacuated in the Philippines before the world’s strongest storm this year hits land on Sunday.
Authorities will shut Manila’s international airport to all flights for 24 hours from 10 a.m. local time Sunday as Super Typhoon Goni approaches, the Manila International Airport Authority said on its website.
"Preemptive evacuation” is underway, Ricardo Jalad, executive director of the Philippines’ disaster risk-monitoring agency, said in a briefing on Saturday. Nearly 800,000 people have fled their homes in Albay province in the main Luzon island, while 200,000 more have been evacuated in nearby provinces, he said.
Super Typhoon Goni is expected to make landfall over Catanduanes early Sunday morning, and will cross the southern Luzon and Metro Manila area from afternoon through evening before exiting land Monday, the Philippine weather bureau said in its 8 p.m. advisory. Categorized by the U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center as a super typhoon while at sea, it’s now packing maximum sustained winds of 215 kilometers per hour (134 miles per hour) and gusts of up to 265 kilometers per hour. It will be 10 nautical miles from Manila, its closest point of approach to the capital, at 7 p.m. tomorrow, according to the JTWC.
The cyclone comes days after Typhoon Molave lashed the Southeast Asian nation, leaving at least 22 dead and causing a minimum of 1.81 billion pesos ($37.4 million) of damage to crops, before heading to Vietnam. Goni is tracking a similar route.
An average of 20 cyclones pass through disaster-prone Philippines every year, and will likely complicate the nation’s fight against the coronavirus as hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated from typhoon-hit areas.
Nearly three dozen areas, including Metro Manila, were placed on storm alert. Catanduanes and the eastern portion of Camarines Sur are under the second-highest storm alert, with winds of 171 kilometers to 220 kilometers per hour expected in the next 12 hours. Under this typhoon signal, very heavy damage to high-risk structures and considerable damage to structures of light materials are expected.
Coconut, rice and corn plantations may suffer severe losses. Typhoon Goni could damage more than 928,000 hectares of land planted with rice and 58,431 hectares of corn, the Department of Agriculture estimates.
The storm can have a "high humanitarian impact,” the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System said on its website, adding that nearly 50 million people are at risk.
Read more: Typhoon Goni Gains Strength as It Heads to the Philippines
Another typhoon, Atsani, is forecast to enter Philippine territory on Sunday but is less likely to bring severe weather over the next three days, according to the nation’s weather forecaster.
Goni is the world’s strongest typhoon this year with sustained winds of 285 kilometers per hour as of Friday, putting it at Category 5-equivalent strength and surpassing Hurricane Laura, which was Category 4 at its peak when it struck the U.S. in August, the Weather Network reported.
