A powerful typhoon pummeled Japan’s southern island of Okinawa yesterday, injuring at least nine people, while weather officials said that the storm would rip through the Japanese archipelago over the weekend.
Typhoon Trami, packing maximum gusts of 216 kph near its center, was forecast to hit mainland Japan early today and cause extreme weather across the nation into tomorrow.
Television footage showed branches ripped from trees by strong winds blocking a main street in Naha, with massive waves splashing on breakwaters on a remote island in the region and torrential horizontal rain.
Photo: Kyodo / Reuters
Local policemen in rain jackets armed with chainsaws were battling the furious wind to remove fallen trees.
About 600 people evacuated to shelters in Okinawa and electricity was cut to nearly 200,000 homes, public broadcaster NHK said.
At least 386 flights were canceled mainly in western Japan, NHK said.
Nine people sustained minor injuries in storm-related incidents in Okinawa, but no one was feared dead, local officials said.
“The number may rise further as we are in the middle of sorting out figures,” said Masatsune Miyazato, an official at the island’s disaster-management office.
“People in Okinawa are used to typhoons, but we are strongly urging them to stay vigilant,” he told reporters.
The weather agency warned people across Japan to be on alert for strong winds, high waves and heavy rain.
“The typhoon is feared to bring record rainfalls and violent winds over large areas,” agency official Yasushi Kajiwara told reporters.
“Please stay on alert, evacuate early and ensure your safety,” Kajiwara said.
After raking the outlying islands, the typhoon was forecast to pick up speed and approach western Japan, “with a very strong force,” as it barrels over mainland Japan, he added.
There have already been heavy downpours in large areas of western and eastern Japan, including the capital, Tokyo, as the storm spurred a seasonal rain front.
Fishermen in Kagoshima Bay, where the typhoon was expected to make landfall, were already making preparations, tying down their boats as Trami approached — even as forecasters warned that another typhoon was following in Trami’s course.
Angler Masakazu Hirase told reporters: “It’s dreadful, because we already know there’s another typhoon after this one, but you cannot compete with nature. We do what we can to limit the damage.”
Western parts of Japan are still recovering from the most powerful typhoon to strike the nation in a quarter of a century after Typhoon Jebi claimed 11 lives and shut down Kansai Airport in Osaka this month.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver