A tropical storm that kept the Philippines on edge for one week veered away yesterday and spared northern provinces still struggling from devastation caused by two previous storms.
The weather bureau said storm Lupit was moving northeast at 15km per hour (kph) toward Japan with maximum sustained winds of 95kph and gusts of up to 120kph.
As of 4am yesterday, the storm was charted 240km northeast of the northern town of Aparri.
The bureau said Lupit was forecast to be 230km east of Okinawa by tomorrow morning.
Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Torres, a spokesman for the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said thousands of people who evacuated their homes in northern provinces had begun to return home.
Storm alerts were lowered across the northern part of the country, where relief operations had been prepared in anticipation of the arrival of a massive typhoon.
Rescue teams dispatched to threatened areas at the start of the week have been “advised to pull out and go back to their respective bases,” Torres said.
Storm Ketsana and Typhoon Parma struck the Philippines one week apart from Sept. 26, triggering the worst flooding in more than 40 years in Manila, as well as massive landslides in northern provinces.
The two back-to-back typhoons left 929 people dead and caused more than US$652 million in damages to agriculture and infrastructure.
Although the weather bureau canceled its storm alerts, residents in the north were told to remain on alert for flashflooding and landslides caused by continued rains.
The ground in the region remains saturated from the previous storms, increasing the risk of mudslides.
The government had prepared relief goods and rescue equipment and pre-emptively evacuated more than 2,500 people from vulnerable areas as the latest storm approached.
Civil defense personnel were overwhelmed when Ketsana and Parma battered Luzon.
More than 162,000 people are still housed in makeshift evacuation centers after the storms because their homes are still flooded, civil defense officials said.
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