Typhoon Chanthu killed three people before weakening into a tropical storm on Friday after making landfall in southern China’s Guangdong province.
Winds, which reached 78 miles per hour (126 kilometers per hour) at the storm’s centre, knocked over a wall in Guangdong’s Wuchuan city, killing two people, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Heavy flooding swept away a 50—year—old male resident of a local village in Hong Kong late Thursday. Marine police said they found his body in open water on Friday morning.
Chanthu has moved north to Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi region and been downgraded to a tropical storm, the China Meteorological Administration said in a statement on its website.
The storm comes as China grapples with severe flooding that has left more than 701 people dead and 347 missing so far this year, according to the flood prevention agency. The death toll is the highest since 1998, when more than 4,000 people died. Damages are in the tens of billions of dollars.
In Guangdong, floods have killed more than a dozen people and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands, Xinhua has said. Landslides triggered by heavy rains crushed homes and floods have wiped out crops across the province since June.
More torrential rains are expected across China this week, in provinces ranging from Yunnan in the southwest to Jilin in the northeast.
