The Philippines’ disaster agency has confirmed that at least 114 people have been killed by Typhoon Kalmaegi, with another 127 people still missing.
According to Al Jazeera, seeing the increasing number of causalities President Ferdinand Marcos Jr declared a state of emergency and warned of another incoming super typhoon.
The worst may also be yet to come with Kalmaegi, as meteorologists with the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) reported that the storm had regained strength as it now bears down on Vietnam’s central regions.
In its most recent alert on Thursday morning at 10am local time in Vietnam (03:00 GMT), the JTWC said that Kalmaegi is “barrelling towards the Vietnamese coast and reaching peak intensity.”
Upgrading the storm to Category 4, the JTWC said “Typhoon Kalmaegi will continue rapid progress … and slam into the Vietnamese coast” just north of the city of Quy Nhon in central Vietnam.
The typhoon, named Tino locally, devastated large areas of the Philippines as it made landfall in eight areas in the centre of the country on Tuesday, in what is officially the deadliest natural disaster to hit the Southeast Asian archipelago nation this year.
Many of the more than 200,000 people who were evacuated have returned to find their homes destroyed, vehicles overturned, and streets blocked with piles of debris.
