Typhoon Rammasun batters China, killing 8

The strongest storm to hit southern China in more than 40 years has killed at least eight people there, state media said Saturday, after causing devastation in the Philippines.

Rammasun first made landfall in China on Friday afternoon as a super typhoon, packing winds exceeding 125 miles per hour and leaving five dead and 99 injured in Hainan province, Xinhua reported.

Rammasun — meaning "Thunder God" in Thai — then lashed Guangdong province and the neighboring Guangxi region where three people died, the official news agency said.

The storm had earlier sliced through the Philippines, killing 77 people at the latest count and wrecking more than 11,000 homes.

Rammasun was the most powerful storm to strike China's southern areas since 1973, the country's National Meteorological Center (NMC) said. It has brought torrential rains and widespread flooding to the area.

The NMC had issued its highest "red alert" for the typhoon, the first such declaration this year. More than 70,000 people have evacuated their homes.

Local television showed roads littered with debris including uprooted trees and rooftops while dozens of flights and rail links were suspended.

Rammasun was downgraded from a super typhoon to a severe typhoon on Saturday, according to the Hong Kong Observatory.

Meanwhile in the Philippines, many are still without power.

In Manila, a city of 12 million people, streets remained littered with fallen trees, branches and electrical posts as repairmen struggle to restore power service.

"It really scrambled whole towns, blowing down houses and toppled power lines," the chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, Richard Gordon, said.

The Philippines is hit by about 20 major storms a year, many of them deadly. The archipelago is often the first major landmass to be struck after storms build above the warm Pacific Ocean.

Rammasun was the first typhoon to make landfall since this year's rainy season began in June.

It was also the first major storm since Typhoon Haiyan devastated the eastern islands of Samar and Leyte in November last year, killing up to 7,300 people in one of the Philippines' worst natural disasters.

Those areas were largely spared from this week's typhoon.

Al Jazeera and wire services