700 000 people evacuated as Typhoon Melor nears Philippine coast

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated in the central Philippines, where a fierce storm is lashing coastal areas with heavy wind and rain, CNN News reports.

Typhoon Melor intensified rapidly over the weekend as it moved toward the eastern island of Samar.

By Monday, December 14 morning, it wielded maximum sustained winds of about 205 kph (125 mph), the equivalent of a strong Category 3 hurricane.

The storm also brings the threat of torrential rainfall across the heart of the Philippine archipelago, including the densely populated region around Manila, the capital.

"This is going to produce significant amounts of rain," CNN weather anchor Derek Van Dam warned. "This part of the world means we could get landslides and flooding."

Typhoon Melor, known in the Philippines as Nona, was expected to clip the sparsely populated northern coast of Samar on Monday. It'll then move west toward more urban areas on the southern tip of Luzon, the country's largest island.

The national disaster management agency said roughly 725,000 people had been preemptively evacuated, the vast majority of them in southern Luzon.

Forty domestic flights were canceled, nearly 8,000 sea travelers were stranded in ports and many schools were closed, the agency said Monday.

The deadliest to hit the country in recent years was Super Typhoon Haiyan -- one of the most powerful storms ever to make landfall -- which left more than 7,000 people dead or missing in November 2013.