Typhoon Saudel Makes Landfall in Zhejiang, the Third Strike on the Same Town in Two Months
Typhoon Saudel came ashore at Yuhuan in Zhejiang on Friday morning, the third typhoon to land on the same subdistrict in under two months — a first for the province — after a red alert and the highest-level emergency response along coastal Zhejiang.
Typhoon Saudel, the 18th named storm of the year, came ashore at 8:05 on Friday morning at Kanmen subdistrict in Yuhuan, a coastal city under Taizhou, Zhejiang province, carrying landfall winds of 35 meters per second and a central pressure of 975 hectopascals, the Central Meteorological Observatory reported. A landfall bulletin is routine paperwork in a Chinese typhoon season. This one closed out something the country's meteorological records had never shown before: Saudel was the third typhoon to make landfall on the same patch of coast in under two months.
"Kanmen has staged a hat trick this year — Bavi, Dolphin, Saudel, three typhoons making landfall," wrote Xin Xin, one of Weibo's best-known weather forecasters, as the eye crossed the shoreline. "The same place in Zhejiang being landed on three times in a single year — that has never been seen." He added, in a line that made the rounds, that Kanmen could "apply for 5A-level typhoon-landfall-site status" (坎门街道可以申请5A级台风登陆点了) — a riff on the rating China gives its top tourist attractions.
The last comparable year anywhere on the Chinese coast was 2010, when Lionrock, Fanapi and Megi all came ashore at Zhangpu in Fujian, as the typhoon-watching account China Weather Enthusiasts pointed out to its followers before dawn.
Yuhuan spent the night bracing for a stronger storm than the one that arrived. The observatory kept its red alert — the highest typhoon warning — in force through Friday morning, at one point rating Saudel a strong typhoon with force-14 winds some 70 kilometers off Wenling, just north of Yuhuan. Zhejiang raised its emergency response to Level I, the maximum, on Thursday evening, and forecasters expect the storm's rain bands to sweep across nine provinces as it moves inland over the weekend.
The town's waterfront still carried the marks of its earlier visitors. Reporters from Zhejiang's China Blue News filmed Kanmen's harbor hours before landfall: stones hurled inland by Bavi's waves in July still lie scattered some 20 meters from the waterline. "The traces the first two typhoons left are still here," the reporter noted.
Saudel is also part of an unusually crowded season. Four typhoons formed in the western Pacific in the six days between August 19 and 24, and on Thursday afternoon, while Saudel was still offshore, the 22nd storm of the year, Etau, came into being. A Baidu explainer asking "why typhoons cluster and intensify this year" charted alongside the storm itself on Friday.
The story had broken well out of the weather channel's audience by mid-morning. Saudel's landfall, the red alert, and a separate item titled "Yuhuan struck three times by typhoons in under two months" all sat on Baidu's trending board, while the top question on Zhihu invited readers to report the weather in their own cities. As we covered when the red alert was issued on Thursday, coastal Zhejiang had already spent two days moving boats, tourists and construction crews out of Saudel's path.
With 22 named storms by late August, the Pacific season is running well ahead of its usual pace — and for the residents of Kanmen, the record books offer little comfort: the peak of the typhoon season, as meteorologists keep reminding them, is still ahead.