Typhoon Noul Forces Evacuation of 340,000 in Southern China

Typhoon Noul forced the evacuation of more than 340,000 people across southern China and triggered widespread transport disruption in Hong Kong, as authorities braced for a storm meteorologists warned carried an unusually high risk of disaster.

Where and when it hit

The storm was forecast to make landfall in the early hours of Sunday somewhere between Shenzhen and Haifeng in Guangdong province, with a red alert, China's highest weather warning level, issued Saturday night as the storm closed in. At landfall, maximum sustained winds were predicted to reach between 151 and 173 km/h, strong enough to cause significant structural and infrastructure damage across the areas in its path.

A province-wide shutdown

Twelve cities across Guangdong, including major population centers Guangzhou, Dongguan and Shantou, suspended classes, work, production, business operations and transportation, either fully or partially, ahead of the storm's arrival. All provincial train services were halted on Sunday, a blanket suspension that reflects how seriously authorities treated the storm's approach rather than a localized precaution limited to the immediate coastal landfall zone.

Hong Kong's parallel disruption

Hong Kong issued its third-highest typhoon warning signal Saturday night and opened 28 temporary shelters for residents seeking safety. The disruption to air travel was substantial: at least 49 flights were cancelled and another 238 delayed. Cathay Pacific, the territory's flagship carrier, cancelled all arrivals and departures between 1:15 am and 6 pm Sunday, a near-total shutdown of the airline's operations through the height of the storm.

Why meteorologists were especially concerned

Weather officials described Noul in terms that went beyond routine storm warnings, characterizing it by its "deep inland penetration, prolonged duration, heavy cumulative rainfall" and "high risk of causing disasters." That combination, a storm that doesn't simply make landfall and dissipate quickly but pushes deep inland while dumping sustained heavy rainfall, tends to produce the kind of flooding and landslide risk that causes casualties well after the initial landfall has passed.

A region still recovering from the last storm

Noul's arrival came only weeks after Typhoon Maysak killed 39 people in the Guangxi region during flooding described as devastating. That recent toll adds weight to the scale of this evacuation: authorities moving 340,000 people ahead of Noul reflects lessons drawn directly from how costly the previous storm proved to be, rather than a routine precautionary measure applied uniformly to every seasonal storm.

What the numbers say about typhoon season this year

Two significant typhoons producing a mass casualty event and a 340,000-person evacuation within weeks of each other points to an unusually active and dangerous typhoon season along China's southern coast this year. For a region that plans its infrastructure and emergency response capacity around historical storm patterns, back-to-back severe systems of this scale put real strain on evacuation logistics, shelter capacity and transportation recovery timelines, particularly when the second storm arrives before the first one's damage has been fully addressed.

With rail and transport services suspended across the province and Hong Kong's aviation sector absorbing a near-complete shutdown for the better part of a day, the full economic and logistical cost of Noul's passage will likely take days to assess even after the storm itself has moved on, mirroring the pattern of extended disruption that followed Maysak just weeks earlier.