Fifth storm in a month bears down on the Philippines

Philippines prepares to evacuate as Tropical Storm Usagi approaches, following a series of devastating storms in recent weeks.

The Philippines prepared on Tuesday to evacuate potentially tens of thousands of people as the fifth major storm in three weeks bore down on the archipelago shortly after the onslaught of Typhoon Toraji. Now a weakened tropical storm, Toraji blew out to sea overnight after causing relatively limited damage and no reported deaths.

But Tropical Storm Usagi is now just two days away from the coast of Luzon, the archipelago nation’s largest and most populous island, and gaining strength, the national weather agency said.

“It is looking like it will follow the track of (Yinxing),” civil defence chief Rueli Rapsing of Cagayan province said, referring to a typhoon that struck the northern tip of the country last week.

“We preemptively evacuated 40,000 people that time, so we could be looking at the same scenario and evacuate 40,000 individuals again,” he said, adding Cagayan officials will decide on it at a meeting on Wednesday.

Mr. Rapsing said the water level of the Cagayan river, the country’s largest, was four metres above normal, preventing more than 5,000 people who were previously evacuated from returning home.

The local government also reported knee-high floods across Santiago, a city of 1,50,000 people along an upper bank of the Cagayan river.

In all the government said it had evacuated more than 32,000 people from vulnerable areas in the northern Philippines ahead of Toraji’s Monday landfall.