16,000 displaced as typhoon strikes

Slow-moving Typhoon Koppu has weakened after blowing ashore with fierce winds in the north-eastern Philippines, leaving at least two people dead and six others missing, while displacing 16,000 villagers.

Army troops and police were deployed to rescue residents trapped in flooded villages in the hard-hit provinces of Aurora, where the typhoon blew ashore, and Nueva Ecija, a nearby rice-growing province where floodwaters swamped farmlands at harvest time.

After slamming into Aurora’s Casiguran town after midnight, the typhoon weakened and slowed considerably, hemmed in by the Sierra Madre mountain range and a high pressure area in the country’s north and another typhoon far out in the Pacific in the east, government forecaster Gladys Saludes said.