How Does a Typhoon Turn Deadly From 450 Kilometers Away?
The diver died Thursday morning and the Suao search started Wednesday — while Champi's center was still hundreds of kilometers offshore and the storm was weakening. The sea doesn't wait for landfall.
On Wednesday afternoon, high waves swept a man out of his car at a port in Suao, on Taiwan’s northeastern coast. The coast guard has been searching for him since Wednesday.
He is still missing.
Earlier that same Wednesday, strong winds and high waves knocked four workers into the sea at a port in Hualien; the coast guard reached them after an emergency call and pulled all four out. On Thursday morning, a free diver in his 20s, identified only by the surname Lin, was caught by a rip current off Beauty Cave on Xiaoliuqiu island, while land and sea warnings for Typhoon Champi were already in effect. Police alerted the coast guard at 11:45 a.m. Divers from a recreational boat found him unresponsive just after 2:25 p.m., performed CPR on the way back to shore, and got him to a hospital in Donggang. He was in cardiac arrest when he arrived. Doctors declared him dead at about 5 p.m.
Champi’s center was still roughly 450 kilometers east of Taiwan’s southern tip on Thursday afternoon, drifting northwest at 18 km/h with sustained winds near 48 meters per second — down from the 296 km/h peak that made it the year’s strongest storm by wind speed two days earlier. But a typhoon’s dangerous water travels ahead of it. Swell radiates hundreds of kilometers beyond the eye, and Champi’s wind field had widened as the storm weakened: the radius of gale-force winds stretched 320 kilometers, large enough to cover most of Taiwan, according to the Central Weather Administration. The waves arrive before the wind does.
Taiwan’s land warning went out Thursday morning, ahead of schedule, covering Yilan, Hualien, Taitung and Pingtung. By the afternoon, nearly every city and county on the main island had suspended work and classes for Friday. Taipei’s mayor declared a typhoon day off. The stock exchange closed. The four Hualien workers and the Suao driver were already at the ports on Wednesday.
Up to 900 millimeters of rain could fall in the northern mountains in the 72 hours through Saturday evening, and nearly a meter is forecast in the hills near Taipei. Forecasters expect Champi to slow near Taiwan’s mountains. Meteorologist Lin Ping-yu warned it could stall, and the CWA’s Wu Wan-hua said it may move erratically into Saturday. That’s when the island’s central range does its work: moist air off the Philippine Sea gets forced upward by the mountains and wrung out as rain, the orographic lift meteorologist Robert Speta laid out in a public briefing this week.
Kaohsiung spent Monday testing 100 pumping stations, 148 mobile pumps and 29 detention ponds built to hold 5.59 million tons of water. Tainan activated its Level 2 disaster response center and put out 230,000 sandbags. In Hualien’s Guangfu township, the worry has a specific shape: two barrier lakes left behind by last year’s flooding. The Matai’an creek lake has been emptied. The Wan-li lake still holds more than five million cubic meters of water, on the highest alert.
China’s water ministry activated a Level IV flood emergency Thursday for Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Fujian, with heavy rain forecast through Sunday. Zhejiang suspended 36 ferry routes, halted 223 marine construction projects and ordered fishing crews ashore. In Japan, JAL, ANA and Skymark canceled more than 100 flights through Sunday, disrupting over 11,000 passengers, with the storm expected to pass between Okinawa and Taiwan on Friday afternoon.
A Taitung ferry captain bringing passengers back from Green Island ahead of schedule described the prevailing caution: “This typhoon is relatively big. Everyone is being more careful trying to minimize damage.” As of Thursday night, the Suao port worker was still missing.
