A fourth super typhoon ripped through the Philippines’ largest island last 17 November, knocking down houses and sending more than half a million people to emergency shelters, as rare back-to-back storms cause havoc across an exhausted nation.
Super Typhoon Man-yi, known locally as Pepito, made initial landfall on the coast of island province Catanduanes, then churned through the sea toward the main island of Luzon’s coast before making a second landfall.
The Philippines is struck by multiple storms annually, but the relentless pace of successive typhoons in the past month has complicated recovery efforts and thousands of people remain in evacuation shelters.
Roberto Monterola, a disaster-mitigation officer at Catanduanes, recalled witnessing strong wind and drastic tidal surges over the weekend.
"The rain was minimal, but the wind was very strong and had this eerie howling sound," he told the Associated Press, adding the tidal surges went up to more than 7 meters near the seaside houses.
Typhoon Yinxing hit the northeastern Philippines last week, with winds equivalent to a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane. There were no casualties reported but the storm brought torrential rain, storm surges and landslides.
Ahead of Man-yi’s arrival, more than 500,000 people evacuated in Luzon’s Bicol region, a disaster official told DZRH radio, Reuters reported Saturday.
At least 26,000 people in the Northern Samar province were evacuated, according to the government-run Philippine News Agency (PNA).
A further 18,000 were preemptively evacuated from the Eastern Samar and Samar provinces, PNA reported, with patients and staff members of Eastern Samar’s Arteche District Hospital being evacuated to the area’s municipal hall.
Civil defense chief Ariel Nepomuceno told Reuters that no casualties were reported, though the typhoon’s strong winds damaged homes, schools and commercial buildings in Catanduanes.
Southeast Asia is already one of the most climate vulnerable regions of the world, experts warn, making it more susceptible to extreme weather like heat waves, storm surges and floods.
Ocean temperatures have been historically warm this year, and hotter oceans provide a huge source of energy for storms to strengthen and grow.
Warmer oceans are being supercharged by humans burning fossil fuels. They are also a major factor behind more significant storms appearing later in the year and scientists say this could become more commonplace in the future.