Typhoon Bavi forced nearly 2 million people to evacuate ahead of its arrival, mostly in Zhejiang province, as the storm battered eastern China and passed north of Taiwan, where authorities said 134 people were injured.
Who Pays First
Taiwan’s fire department said the 134 injuries were mainly from falling off motorbikes, slipping or being struck by objects. No deaths were reported. The transport ministry said 137 international flights were cancelled on Sunday, along with 62 domestic trips. That’s the kind of disruption ordinary people absorb while the machinery of transport and emergency response tries to keep pace with a storm that doesn’t care about borders, schedules, or official calm.
Bavi struck Zhejiang’s coastal city of Yuhuan at around 11:20 p.m. on Saturday, 1520 GMT, before making a second landfall in Yueqing, part of the city of Wenzhou, at around midnight. The storm was the most powerful to strike mainland China this year, though by Sunday morning it had weakened to a tropical storm as it pushed inland. Forecasters warned that the France-sized storm system could unleash prolonged and widespread rainfall across eastern and northern China in the coming days.
What the People Saw
In Wenzhou, a person rode an electric scooter through a flooded road after heavy rain brought by Typhoon Bavi. Yueqing resident Li Liangxing described the scene in plain, battered detail. "When it made landfall last night, the winds were very strong," he said. "We could hear roof tiles and tree branches falling. Of course we were scared, but we live by the sea, so we're used to it."
He also pointed to a flooded canal beside his residential compound and said he had never seen the water rise so high. "There used to be a walkway there, but now it's underwater," he said. That’s the reality at ground level: homes, walkways, and daily movement swallowed by water while the storm system keeps moving and the people below improvise.
More than 1,300 trees fell across Yueqing, with more than 700 of them uprooted entirely, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The deepest flooding reached roughly half the height of a vehicle tire. Emergency crews on Sunday deployed excavators and chainsaws to clear waterlogged streets littered with fallen trees. In the city’s mountainous north, footage aired by CCTV showed a landslide that sent large boulders tumbling onto a mountain road, while swollen river waters submerged nearby trees.
The Networks That Freeze Up
The disruption spread through transport systems in both Taiwan and China. In Taiwan, the transport ministry said 137 international flights were cancelled on Sunday, along with 62 domestic trips. In Zhejiang’s provincial capital, Hangzhou, two major train stations suspended all services and 327 flights were cancelled at Xiaoshan International Airport. In neighbouring Shanghai, a total of 1,620 train trips and 684 flights were cancelled, state-backed The Paper reported.
That’s not just weather. It’s a reminder of how tightly ordinary life is bound to centralized transport networks, where a storm can shut down movement across entire regions in a matter of hours. The people at the bottom don’t get to opt out. They wait, reroute, clean up, and absorb the damage.
Benjamin Horton, the dean of the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong, said regions near Bavi’s path could receive several hundred millimetres of rain in a matter of days, raising the risk of flooding, landslides and urban inundation. "Even if the storm weakens after landfall, its large circulation can continue to generate destructive weather hundreds of kilometres inland," he said. Horton also said, "Rapid intensification (of typhoons) reduces preparation time for communities and emergency managers, making these events particularly challenging."
Scientists have warned China could face more extreme weather this year with the expected emergence of the El Nino weather pattern, which can drive up temperatures and shift typhoon tracks westward toward the country’s coast. The storm has already done its work: evacuations, injuries, cancelled flights, flooded roads, fallen trees, and a landscape of damage that the official response now has to chase.