Typhoon Saudel's Third Landfall: 599,300 Evacuated in Fujian

An Unusually Persistent Storm Tests Fujian's Flood Defenses

Typhoon Saudel, the 18th typhoon of 2026, slammed into China's southeastern coast for a third time on Thursday morning, forcing one of the largest storm evacuations of the year and turning streets across Fujian Province into rivers. The storm made landfall near Gulei in Zhangpu County, under the city of Zhangzhou, at around 6:30 a.m. on September 3 with maximum sustained winds of 23 meters per second, according to the provincial meteorological observatory.

By Friday night, Fujian's flood control and drought relief headquarters said 599,300 residents had been evacuated from risky offshore and onshore areas, and several provincial departments had urgently allocated 210 million yuan, about US$31 million, for rescue, relief and post-disaster recovery. The scale of the evacuation grew roughly sevenfold in under two days: authorities had moved more than 83,000 people by 7 a.m. on Thursday alone, Xinhua reported.

A Storm That Refused to Die

What makes Saudel remarkable is not just its strength but its persistence. The typhoon made its first two landfalls in China along the coast of Zhejiang Province on August 28, then weakened into a tropical depression after moving into Guangxi on August 30. Over the South China Sea, it regenerated into a tropical storm on September 1, keeping its name and international number, before curving back toward Fujian for a third landfall, CGTN reported.

The sequence is rare enough that the China Meteorological Administration has described this year's typhoon pattern as exceptional. Saudel is the seventh typhoon to hit China in 2026, and Reuters reported it is the third to strike the city of Yuhuan in eastern Zhejiang in less than two months. The repeated strikes have kept emergency services across the southeast on alert since late August.

Evacuations and Closures Spread Across the Southeast

The storm's outer bands brought persistent torrential rain to much of Fujian, forcing work, business and school suspensions in parts of Zhangzhou, with schools also closed in Fuzhou, Quanzhou and Ningde. By Thursday morning, eight sections of major roads had been shut, 657 transport services suspended, work halted at 152 construction sites and more than 150 tourist attractions closed across the province, according to provincial authorities.

The rain did not stay inside Fujian's borders. Saudel affected 128,500 residents across 53 counties in neighboring Jiangxi Province and forced the emergency evacuation of nearly 8,700 people there. China's National Meteorological Center maintained a blue typhoon alert and warned that heavy to torrential rain would persist from Thursday afternoon through Friday across most of Fujian, eastern and northern Guangdong, southern Jiangxi and southern Hunan, with up to 300 millimeters possible in parts of Fujian and Guangdong.

The human cost is still being counted. CCTV reported on Friday that rescue teams were still working to reach trapped residents, and officials acknowledged that some people were missing. The Fujian headquarters has kept its flood-control emergency response in place even as the typhoon itself weakened, a sign that officials regard the rainfall, rather than the wind, as the longer threat.

Rescuers Wade Into Flooded Towns

As the water rose, rescue crews moved through inundated communities. In the city of Fuding, known for its tea plantations, firefighters waded through waist-deep floodwater to carry elderly residents to safety, according to social media footage verified by Reuters. In nearby Jinxi village, a mountain tea-growing community, raging floodwater brought down a three-storey brick house, the footage showed.

In Putian, where the Mulan River runs through the urban core, floodwater spilled over main highways, damaged bridge structures and inundated residential buildings, according to videos shared on China's RedNote platform. State broadcaster CCTV reported on Friday that local authorities were organizing rescue teams to evacuate trapped residents, adding that some people were missing. The Ministry of Natural Resources warned that the saturated ground posed a high risk of secondary disasters such as landslides.

A Regional Storm With a Japanese Chapter

For readers in Tokyo and across Japan, Saudel is a familiar name. The same system battered Japan's southern islands in late August before turning toward China's east coast, part of a punishing stretch of the 2026 season that has already brought Typhoon Chan-hom's historic landfall in Ibaraki Prefecture and repeated strikes near Okinawa. That Saudel then regenerated and came ashore in Fujian illustrates how a single western Pacific system can threaten both countries in a single lifecycle.

The transboundary arc has practical consequences for disaster planners on both sides of the East China Sea. Japan's experience with Saudel in late August showed how quickly a storm dismissed as weakening can reorganize over warm water, and Chinese forecasters watched the same system follow that playbook when it regenerated over the South China Sea on September 1. For Japanese businesses with manufacturing or logistics exposure along China's southeast coast, the Fujian closures and transport suspensions are a reminder of how tightly the region's supply chains are tied to typhoon season.

The shared exposure matters because the mechanisms driving this year's storms are regional, not national. Hui Su, a professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told Reuters that Super El Nino conditions have shifted typhoon formation further east, producing storms that travel longer distances and intensify before reaching land in China or southern Asia. She said the season could extend into December, well beyond the usual October or November close.

El Nino Looms Over the 2026-2027 Outlook

The typhoon risk is colliding with a deteriorating global climate outlook. The United Nations warned on September 3 that the current El Nino is set to intensify further into 2027 and could become the strongest ever recorded, raising the risk of prolonged extreme weather across the Pacific basin. During El Nino years, the western Pacific subtropical high is exceptionally strong and positioned further north, guiding typhoons along a northwest trajectory directly toward China's eastern coast, Reuters explained.

For Japan, the same dynamics argue for a long watch: an extended typhoon season in the western Pacific rarely ends at China's shoreline. Meteorologists on both sides of the East China Sea are now tracking whether the pattern that produced Saudel's unusual three-landfall arc continues into the autumn.

What to Watch For

In the immediate term, the National Meteorological Center expects Saudel to move westward at 15 to 20 kilometers per hour and gradually weaken, but the rain it leaves behind is the greater danger. Fujian and Guangdong braced for further downpours through Friday, and authorities warned that landslide risk would remain elevated for days after the floodwater recedes.

For Japan and the wider region, the storm is a preview of a longer question: whether 2026's El Nino-strengthened typhoon season, which has already thrown Saudel, Narra, Dolphin and Chan-hom against the East Asian coast, will extend into December and into a stronger 2027. The evacuation numbers out of Fujian, and the rare path of the storm that produced them, are a measure of how much is at stake.

By Kenji Tanaka, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: CGTN, Reuters, Xinhua via People's Daily Online.