GEORGE DESIPRIS / Pexels / Pexels licence
The storm reached eastern China after more than 1,000 flights were cancelled, but reports differ on the total and key details remain unknown.
More than 1,000 flights had been cancelled by the time Typhoon Dolphin reached eastern China on Sunday evening, after evacuations began and meteorological authorities reported the storm’s arrival.
Dolphin made landfall after approaching China’s eastern coast. Reports before landfall described flight cancellations and evacuations as the country prepared for the storm, while later reporting confirmed that it had crossed the coast.
The available accounts establish the sequence of events more clearly than their scale. Flight cancellations and evacuations were under way before landfall. The storm then moved into China, turning preparations for an approaching typhoon into a response to one already ashore.
Two reports gave different figures for cancelled flights. ABC News Australia reported more than 1,000 cancellations, while Al Jazeera reported over 1,600. The reports do not provide a common geographic scope or reporting cutoff that would allow the figures to be reconciled. They establish that more than 1,000 flights were cancelled, but they do not yield a single total.
The difference between the figures leaves the precise extent of the interruption to air travel unresolved. It is unclear whether the accounts measured the same airports, routes or period. No final cancellation count was included in the available material.
Evacuations also took place before the storm arrived. The reports do not give the number of people involved, the places from which they left or the locations to which they were taken. That leaves the scale and geographic reach of the evacuations undetermined.
Meteorological authorities issued a top-level alert, ABC News Australia reported. The available material does not identify the alert’s formal designation, the area it covered or the measures attached to it. Those missing details make it impossible to establish how the alert operated alongside the cancellations and evacuations.
Al Jazeera reported that Dolphin’s winds reached 162 kilometres per hour overnight as it approached the eastern coast. No other wind measurement was provided, and the available reports do not specify where that speed was recorded or whether it was sustained wind or a gust.
The reports do not provide a casualty count or a damage assessment following landfall. They also do not establish whether flooding occurred in China, which communities were affected after the storm crossed the coast or whether transport interruptions extended beyond cancelled flights.
Dolphin’s arrival confirms that the threat described in earlier reports became a landfalling storm. Yet the information needed to measure its immediate human and physical effects remains incomplete. Even the exact location and time at which the typhoon crossed China’s coast have not been established.