Shanghai braces for direct hit from Typhoon Bebinca By Reuters

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – Shanghai halted transport links, recalled ships and closed tourist sites including the Shanghai Disney Resort on Sunday as it braced for Typhoon Bebinca in what could be the strongest tropical cyclone which hit the Chinese financial center in 1949.

The Category 1 typhoon, with maximum sustained winds near its center of about 144 kilometers per hour (89 miles per hour), was about 500 kilometers southeast of Shanghai at 1:00 p.m. (0500 GMT) . It is expected to reach China’s east coast after midnight on Monday.

The strongest storm to hit Shanghai in recent decades was Typhoon Gloria in 1949, which tore through the city with gusts of 144 km/h. Shanghai was last threatened with a direct hit in 2022 by the powerful typhoon Muifa, which instead made landfall 300 km away in the city of Zhoushan in Zhejiang province.

Shanghai is typically spared the powerful typhoons that hit further south in China, including Yagi, a destructive Category 4 storm that tore through the southern province of Hainan last week. But Shanghai and neighboring provinces are not taking any chances with Bebinca category 1.

Resorts in Shanghai, including Shanghai Disney Resort, Jinjiang Amusement Park and Shanghai Wild Animal Park, were temporarily closed, while most ferries to and from Chongming Island – China’s third largest island, known as the “gateway to to the Yangtze River”.

More than 600 flights to and from Shanghai were also canceled, according to local media.

In Zhejiang, ships were recalled, while several parks in the provincial capital Hangzhou announced closures.

Bebinca’s arrival will coincide with the Mid-Autumn festival, a three-day national holiday in which many Chinese travel or engage in outdoor activities.

China’s Ministry of Water Resources on Saturday issued a Level IV emergency response – the lowest level in China’s four-tier emergency response system – for potential flooding in Shanghai and Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces.