At least three people have died and nearly 400,000 others have fled their homes as Typhoon Kalmaegi swept across the central Philippines, triggering severe floods, landslides, and power outages, according to the country’s disaster agency.
The powerful storm, locally named Tino, made landfall early Tuesday, inundating large parts of the Visayas region, including the island province of Cebu, one of the nation’s major urban and commercial hubs.
Footage shared on social media showed residents clinging to rooftops as floodwaters rose rapidly, sweeping away cars, shipping containers, and debris. Local officials described the situation as “unprecedented.”
“We were expecting the winds to be the dangerous part, but it’s the water that’s truly putting our people at risk,” Cebu’s provincial governor, Pamela Baricuatro, said in a Facebook post. “The floodwaters are just devastating.”
Residents in Cebu City said they were caught off guard by the scale of the flooding. “I’ve been here for 28 years, and this is by far the worst we’ve experienced,” Don del Rosario, a local resident, told AFP.
The storm, which brought sustained winds of around 80 mph (130 km/h), has since weakened but continues to bring heavy rain as it moves across the Visayas islands toward the South China Sea.
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Amid rescue operations, a Philippine Air Force (PAF) helicopter crashed on northern Mindanao island while assisting flood relief efforts, the military confirmed.
“Communication with the helicopter was lost, which immediately prompted the launch of a search and rescue operation,” the PAF said in a statement. Authorities have yet to confirm the number of people on board or whether there were survivors.
The Office of Civil Defence said nearly 400,000 people were preemptively evacuated from vulnerable coastal and low-lying communities. Many are being housed in temporary shelters as emergency services struggle to reach flooded areas cut off by rising waters and debris.
Typhoon Kalmaegi is the latest in a string of destructive storms to batter the Philippines this year. The country, which lies along the Pacific “typhoon belt,” is hit by an average of 20 tropical storms and typhoons annually, according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA).
The typhoon comes just weeks after Super Typhoon Ragasa and Typhoon Bualoi struck the same region, killing more than a dozen people and destroying crops and infrastructure.