Typhoon Dolphin slams eastern China, forcing 1M+ evacuations and mass flight cancellations

Typhoon Dolphin arrived at China's eastern coast on Sunday evening with the force of the year's most powerful cyclone to reach the country. The storm made landfall near Yuhuan in Zhejiang province, its center packed with sustained winds of 151 kilometers per hour—the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane. By then, it had already crossed Japan's Okinawa prefecture, leaving six people injured and cutting electricity to more than 50,000 buildings in its wake.

The scale of the evacuation was staggering. More than one million people were moved from their homes across Zhejiang, Shanghai, Fujian, and surrounding provinces as authorities braced for what the storm would bring: torrential rain, flooding, landslides, and structural damage. In Wenzhou alone, officials relocated more than 900,000 residents and opened more than 1,000 emergency shelters. Fujian province evacuated an additional 98,900 people from high-risk zones after raising its typhoon emergency response to Level 3, a designation also activated by Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Jiangsu.

The disruption to movement was immediate and sweeping. Shanghai cancelled approximately 1,500 flights according to flight-tracking data, leaving travelers stranded and uncertain. Among them was a 42-year-old tourist from Guangdong named Chen, whose family's Sunday departure was scrapped. Rebooked for Monday at 10 p.m., Chen and his relatives waited without knowing if that flight would actually depart. He noted, with the perspective of someone from China's southern coast, that the typhoon seemed unremarkable by regional standards—"as ordinary as having a meal and feeling the wind." For him, it was simply part of living there.

Maritime authorities took equally aggressive precautions. Shanghai's Yangshan port cleared its berths and moved more than 500 small and medium-sized vessels to shelter. In Fujian, 55 coastal passenger ferry routes were suspended, all 115 offshore construction projects halted, and 290 construction vessels relocated to protected waters. Across the region, offshore workers were brought to safety and vessels ordered back to port. Authorities increased inspections at reservoirs, mountain streams, landslide-prone areas, construction sites, and tourist locations.

Forecasters warned that the heaviest rainfall would persist through August 10 across a wide swath of eastern China—Zhejiang, Shanghai, northern Fujian, northeastern Jiangxi, central and southern Anhui, and much of Jiangsu. Parts of central and eastern Zhejiang could receive between 250 and 500 millimeters of rain. Wang Haiping, chief forecaster at the National Meteorological Centre, told state broadcaster CCTV that Dolphin would track westward after landfall, then slow over central and southwestern China while gradually weakening. That slowdown, paradoxically, posed its own danger: prolonged heavy rain would increase the risk of flooding and landslides, particularly in mountainous terrain and along smaller rivers.

The water resources ministry identified four major rivers—the Qiantang, Yong, Jiao, and Shuiyang—as vulnerable to significant flooding. Smaller rivers in the hardest-hit areas were expected to rise above warning levels. Authorities issued red mountain-torrent warnings for parts of Zhejiang and instructed residents in those zones to follow local evacuation orders without delay.

The storm's arrival underscored a broader pattern scientists have documented: global warming has made extreme weather events more frequent and more intense, including stronger typhoons. Dolphin was not an anomaly but a symptom of a shifting climate. As the storm moved inland and the full scope of its impact became clearer, the question was no longer whether it would cause damage, but how much, and where the greatest harm would fall.