China spent Sunday moving roughly half a million people out of the way of a storm that had not yet arrived. Typhoon Dolphin is forecast to come ashore overnight Sunday into Monday somewhere between Zhoushan in Zhejiang province and Fuding in Fujian, carrying sustained winds "up to 162km/h (101mph)" [1]. Ahead of it, the evacuation numbers read like the census of a mid-sized city: about 390,000 people relocated in Taizhou, a coastal prefecture in Zhejiang squarely near the projected track, roughly 99,000 more across Fujian province, and over 30,000 in Shanghai [1].
The warning apparatus went to its ceiling. China's national observatory issued a red alert, the top of its typhoon warning scale, and Zhejiang raised its provincial emergency response to Level I, also the highest tier [2]. As of 10:00 am Sunday the storm's center sat about 215 kilometers offshore, east of the port city of Wenzhou, with maximum winds CGTN put at "45 meters per second" [2]. That figure converts to 162 kilometers per hour, which matches the wind speed Al Jazeera reported, so the two accounts describe the same storm at the same strength.
The disruption on the ground is already large. More than 1,600 flights were cancelled, about 1,400 of them at Shanghai's two airports, Hongqiao and Pudong, and another 270 at Hangzhou [1]. The rain forecast extends the storm's reach well past the landfall zone: heavy to torrential rain is expected through Wednesday across Taiwan, Fujian, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, southern and central Anhui, eastern Hubei, and eastern Hunan [1]. That list covers much of the country's most densely populated and economically productive coast and the river valleys behind it.
One fact deserves to be stated as plainly as the evacuation totals: as of these reports, no casualties had been reported in China. The storm's only reported injuries so far came from Japan, where it passed Okinawa and left seven people with minor injuries, among them a man over 100 years old who was knocked down by gusts [1].
The zero in China's casualty column is not yet an outcome, because the storm has not yet landed. It is, at this hour, a measure of the machine that runs before landfall. Moving 390,000 people out of one prefecture in a day, grounding 1,400 flights at the country's busiest aviation hub, and pushing a province to its maximum response level are all costs paid up front, against a storm whose exact track between Zhoushan and Fuding is still a forecast. Whether the bill was sized correctly will be known by Monday morning. What is already knowable is the scale of the wager: half a million people displaced from their homes tonight so that the number in the casualty column has a chance of staying where it is.
The next 24 hours will fill in the rest, starting with where between Zhoushan and Fuding the center crosses the coast, and then with what three days of torrential rain do to the nine provinces and regions in the forecast cone. The record as of Sunday morning is the part that is settled: a red alert, a Level I response, 1,600 grounded flights, and about 500,000 people who are somewhere other than where the storm is headed [1][2].
