Typhoon Saudel brings torrential rain, flooding to China's coastal areas

China's southern coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong braced for more heavy rainfall on Friday after Typhoon Saudel unleashed severe flooding in urban and rural regions, causing vehicles to become submerged and a three-story brick building to collapse. In Fujian's tea-growing town of Fuding, firefighters waded through chest-high floodwaters to rescue elderly individuals, as verified footage from social media demonstrated.

Nearby Jinxi village, surrounded by mountains, experienced raging floodwaters that inundated residential buildings, toppling a three-story structure in the process. Authorities imposed emergency flood protocols and halted schools, public transportation across multiple coastal areas. Saudel made its third landfall in Fujian on Thursday, after strengthening again over the South China Sea.

This marks the seventh typhoon to impact China this year, and the third to strike Yuhuan in eastern Zhejiang in under two months. The sequence is extremely uncommon, experts say, and directly attributable to El Niño. The United Nations predicts El Niño will intensify further in 2027, potentially becoming the strongest on record and increasing the likelihood of prolonged extreme weather events.

Over 83,000 people have been relocated across Zhejiang and nearby provinces since late August, with more than 83,000 evacuations in Fujian alone as Saudel tracked inland and rained down on surrounding areas. In Putian, a city in Fujian where the Mulan River flows through the urban center, floodwaters breached main highways, damaged bridges, and flooded residential properties, per videos shared on China’s RedNote.

Local authorities are mobilizing rescue teams to evacuate trapped residents, while some may be missing. Stronger, prolonged typhoon seasons are expected due to Super El Niño conditions, which shift typhoon formation further east, according to Hui Su, a civil engineering professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"This typhoon season, we tend to see stronger typhoons form towards the east and they travel long distances, becoming much stronger upon reaching land, as seen in China and southern Asia," Su explained. The typhoon season may persist into December, instead of its typical end in October or November, due to an extended period of warm weather.