As wind and rain from a powerful tropical cyclone lashed southern Japan on Wednesday, the authorities said the storm had left at least one person dead and knocked out power to more than 200,000 homes.
The storm, Typhoon Khanun, was causing damage and disruption in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture days after an earlier tropical cyclone left dozens of people dead or injured in mainland China and the Philippines. The person who died in Japan on Wednesday was a 90-year-old man who had been in his garage when it collapsed, the Okinawa police told NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster.
Khanun was moving slowly northwest on Wednesday, away from Japan and toward mainland China. It was less than 70 miles southwest of a major United States military base in Okinawa as of Wednesday morning local time, according to the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii.
The storm was expected to turn north later in the week, back toward Japan, in a weakened state — but not before dumping several inches of rain in Okinawa and elsewhere in southern Japan.
Khanun was producing maximum sustained winds of 115 miles per hour on Wednesday, making it the equivalent of a Category 3 storm on the five-category wind scale that meteorologists in the United States use to measure Atlantic hurricanes. (Tropical cyclones are called hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the northwestern Pacific.)
Several areas of Japan were under weather warnings or advisories on Wednesday, according to Japan’s meteorological agency. Flights and bus services had also been canceled in many parts of Okinawa for a second straight day.
As of Wednesday morning, more than a third of the roughly 600,000 households in the prefecture were experiencing power outages because of the typhoon, according to Okinawa Electric Power Company.
Kadena Air Base, the United States military installation on Okinawa that was near the storm on Wednesday, said that it was bracing for wind gusts of 110 m.p.h. in the afternoon.
As of Wednesday morning, those rains had left at least 20 people dead and more than 30 others missing in Beijing and some cities in the northern Chinese province of Hebei, the state-run news media reported. Rescue work and disaster relief was still underway, and the Beijing Meteorological Service said that the rainfall in the city had been the heaviest in 140 years.
On its way to China, Doksuri also had battered the northern Philippines with the force of a Category 4 storm. The Philippine authorities said last week at least 13 people were killed in flooding and landslides, and that at least 26 died after strong winds caused a ferry to capsize near the capital, Manila.
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