BEIJING -- A typhoon was pounding southeast China late Saturday, leaving more than a million homes without power after lashing Taiwan, where it downed trees, traffic lights and power lines, and left six people dead and four missing.
Typhoon Soudelor hit the city of Putian in Fujian province late Saturday and was downgraded into a tropical storm today as it moved across the province.
The storm earlier caused more than 3 million households in Taiwan to lose electricity, with streets strewn with fallen trees. All 279 domestic flights on the island were canceled Saturday, as well as at least 37 international flights. At least 101 people were injured in the storm.
An 8-year-old girl and her mother died when they were swept out to sea Thursday from a beach on the east coast, Taiwan's official Central News Agency reported. The girl's twin sister remains missing.
Other casualties included a firefighter who was killed and another injured after being hit by a drunken driver as they attempted to move a fallen tree in the island's south. A man was swept down a river to his death in the central part of the island, and another man was killed by a falling signboard. A motorcyclist died after running into a fallen tree.
More than 185 people were hit by windblown signboards, falling trees or broken glass, said Lee Wei-sen, secretary general of the government's National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction.
The center of the storm made landfall in eastern Taiwan before daybreak Saturday. By midmorning, Soudelor was packing maximum sustained winds of 100 miles per hour, Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said.
The typhoon weakened later Saturday with top winds of up to 89 mph while moving away from the island in a northwesterly direction.
Strong winds and heavy rains were expected to continue in Taiwan.
Local TV showed images of landslides and flooding throughout Taiwan, with fallen trees hitting cars and blocking roads. Soudelor's winds tore off roofs, signs and at least one bus stop from their fixtures and threw motor scooters into the air. Carriages of a freight train were overturned in Suao, in the northeast where winds were the strongest.
More than 47 inches of rain had fallen on Taiping Mountain in Yilan since Thursday, the weather bureau said Saturday.
The Fujian Civil Affairs Department said the storm collapsed 36 houses and damaged 281 others, but no casualties were reported. Authorities said they had evacuated more than 370,000 people and ordered around 32,000 boats back to port before the typhoon made landfall. More than 7,000 soldiers and police were on standby, provincial authorities said.
The provincial capital of Fuzhou was battered by heavy rain and strong winds, and all flights to the city were canceled, Xinhua said.
Heavy rains were forecast through this morning in the northern part of Fujian.
Even before the storm made landfall, strong winds caused power failures to more than 1.41 million households in the province, Xinhua said.
On Friday afternoon, marine police rescued 55 university students and teachers trapped on a small island where they had been attending a summer camp, after strong gales stopped ferry services, Xinhua said.
The U.S. government was sending more aid to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which was battered by Soudelor last Sunday. The powerful typhoon snapped utility poles and toppled trees, leaving residents without electricity and running water.
The Pacific Daily News reported that food, water, dry milk, power generators and temporary shelter are expected to arrive on the main island of Saipan this weekend.
The goods left Guam aboard the USS Ashland on Friday. Hundreds of Marines are also on the amphibious dock landing ship, which was returning to Japan from a three-week military exercise off Australia but rerouted to Saipan.
President Barack Obama has declared the Northern Marianas a disaster area and ordered federal aid to help the U.S. territory.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press, by Julie Makinen and Ralph Jennings of the Los Angeles Times, and by Tim Culpan and Sarah Chen of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 08/09/2015