Typhoon Champi shuts schools and grounds every domestic flight in Taiwan

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Taiwan shuts schools and grounds flights as Typhoon Champi brushes by independent.co.uk

Typhoon Champi swept past Taiwan on Friday without its centre touching the coast, and the island shut down anyway. Schools and offices closed, all 262 domestic flights were cancelled, and the transport ministry counted 669 international flights grounded. One person was killed on Thursday after being swept away by waves on Liuqiu, an islet off the southeastern coast, and 94 people were injured across Taiwan.

Champi had peaked at 298 kph sustained winds earlier in the week and arrived off the southwest coast at 155 kph. Nearly 1,300 people were evacuated from mountainous areas, and the Central Weather Administration told coastal residents to stay away from the shore and watch for falling objects. The storm then curved north towards Japan's southwestern islands, where a woman in her 70s broke a leg in the wind on Miyako and nearly 2,000 homes on Ishigaki lost power. In the northern Philippines, the coast guard barred ships and ferries from choppy waters, the airport at Basco boarded up its windows, and about 200 people moved to safer ground in Cagayan province. Guam, which Champi passed earlier in the month, has been declared a federal disaster area.

The closure fell on the island where the world's most advanced semiconductors are made, days after four construction workers — employees of a contractor, not of TSMC itself — died building the company's new plant in Kaohsiung, an accident that stopped steel work across all of Taiwan pending an investigation. The Kaohsiung fab has yet to produce a single chip. The high-speed rail line along the western coast, where most of Taiwan's population lives, ran on schedule throughout.

Champi's centre never made landfall. Taiwan closed all the same.