Typhoon Dolphin came ashore near Yuhuan City in Zhejiang province at about 5:30 pm local time on Sunday, 09:30 GMT, inside the window forecasters had drawn for it a day earlier [1][2]. The landfall itself held few surprises. The scale of the evacuation that preceded it did.
On Sunday we reported that Chinese authorities had moved about half a million people out of the storm's path. That figure is now out of date, and the revision runs in one direction. By the time Dolphin crossed the coast, the relocation had grown to roughly 1.42 million people [1]. Wenzhou, the prefecture-level city south of the landfall point, accounted for the largest share by far, relocating "more than 900,000 residents" on its own [1]. Taizhou moved 390,000 people, Fujian province about 98,900, and Shanghai about 30,300 [1]. Those four figures sum to just over 1.419 million, which is the arithmetic behind the "more than 1.4 million" total now appearing in wire copy. For scale, Wenzhou's contribution alone is close to double the entire evacuation we reported a day ago.
The storm arrived somewhat weaker than advertised. Saturday's forecasts put winds at 162 km/h at landfall. What the National Meteorological Centre actually measured when Dolphin hit the coast was Force 14, "42 meters per second", which works out to about 151 km/h [2]. That is a gap of roughly 11 km/h between forecast and observation, a miss on the right side of the ledger, though not one that changed the response: the centre had issued a red alert, its highest warning level, as the typhoon approached, and Force 14 winds at landfall left the alert well founded [2].
The disruption around the evacuation was itself substantial. More than 1,000 emergency shelters opened to take in the displaced [1]. Some 1,400 flights were cancelled at Shanghai's two airports, with another 270 scrubbed at Hangzhou, cutting air links across the Yangtze River Delta for the weekend [1].
As of the reporting available Sunday evening, no casualties had been reported in China [1][2]. That is worth stating plainly, because a Force 14 landfall in one of the most densely populated coastal corridors on earth is precisely the setup in which casualties happen, and the relocation of 1.42 million people ahead of the wall of the storm is the most plausible reason the count currently stands at zero.
The unfinished part of this story is water, not wind. Dolphin's rain is forecast to continue through August 12, and parts of Zhejiang are expected to receive between 250 and 600 mm over that stretch [2]. Flooding and landslides after landfall, once the headline winds have passed and attention moves on, are where typhoon losses tend to concentrate. The evacuation numbers in this piece may not be the last figures we have to revise upward, and we will update the record again as the rainfall totals come in.
