But there were no signs of the kind of the mass devastation wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan five years ago.
Still, officials had barely begun to assess the damage. Some places could not be contacted because of communication outages, and several provinces suffered complete power blackouts.
The ferocity of the storm — which arrived at 1:40 a.m. local time with maximum sustained winds of around 120 miles per hour — in some ways eclipsed Hurricane Florence on the other side of the world, which was pummeling the Mid-Atlantic Coast of the United States with life-threatening rains and flooding.
By Saturday night, Mangkhut’s eye had crossed Luzon, the Philippines’ largest island, and was headed for Hong Kong and southern China, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center of the United States Navy. The typhoon weakened slightly by Sunday morning, with maximum sustained winds of just over 100 m.p.h. and gusts of up to 125 m.p.h., the agency said.
The New York Times reporters Hannah Beech and Kimberly dela Cruz traveled along Luzon’s western and northern coasts on Saturday. Foliage, trees and rolling coconuts were strewn across the roads, which were deserted except for volunteer crews removing debris to make them passable and the occasional emergency vehicle.
Mangkhut was moving relatively quickly across the South China Sea and was on track to pass south of Hong Kong Sunday afternoon before barreling into southern China’s Guangdong Province by the evening.
Winds had weakened but forecasts said it would still pack the power of a Category 2 storm when it made landfall, possibly near Maoming, a big petrochemicals center.
The area has relatively few low-lying towns that would be vulnerable to storm surge as the typhoon makes landfall, and Guangdong, China’s most populous province, has extensive experience with typhoons, and makes elaborate preparations for each of them.
Evacuations of low-lying areas are mandatory. Fishing vessels are ordered into well-protected anchorages. After 16 workers were killed when their shanty collapsed in a typhoon in 2003, the province pursued a strenuous campaign of demolishing or upgrading substandard housing.
Hong Kong itself is quite resilient to typhoons. Although heavy rain may trigger landslides, the former British colony is not especially vulnerable to flooding because it has few low-lying areas.
The sprawling river delta around it, however, is barely above sea level and has struggled with flooding despite years of investment in drainage systems. Climate change has exacerbated the problem. The provincial capital, Guangzhou, has more to lose from rising seas and more severe storms than any other city on the planet, according to a World Bank report.
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