Typhoon Koppu, known in the Philippines as Typhoon Lando, slowed to a virtual standstill on Sunday as it paralelled the coast of northwestern Luzon Island. The storm continued to lash the region with heavy rain and strong winds, though the catastrophic rainfall scenario of 20 to 40 inches or more has not yet come to fruition.
The storm is is not expected to move far enough away from the Philippines to shut the rain off entirely until at least Wednesday, local time, providing plenty of room for more heavy rain to fall.
Although the full toll from the storm won't be clear for several days -- the locations where the worst winds and highest waves occurred were relatively sparsely populated and have been cut off from communication -- at least two people are known to have died, with at least 16,000 displaced across several provinces, officials said.
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The storm blew ashore with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour, enough to be classified as a super typhoon but just below Category 5 status, near the community of Casiguran in Luzon's Aurora Province at about 1 a.m. local time on Sunday morning.
Although the storm's winds have weakened considerably since then, the storm system still poses a deadly flood threat due to its slow movement and powerful thunderstorms that can drop several inches of rain in just an hour or two.
Army troops and police were deployed to rescue residents trapped in flooded villages in the hard-hit provinces of Aurora, where the typhoon made landfall early Sunday, and Nueva Ecija, a nearby rice-growing province where floodwaters swamped rice farmlands at harvest time.
Howling winds knocked down trees and electric posts, leaving nine entire provinces without power, while floods and small landslides made 25 roads and bridges impassable. Authorities suspended dozens of flights and sea voyages due to the stormy weather, and many cities canceled classes on Monday.
The storm is expected to be declared at tropical storm by late Monday before it exits Luzon. Still, that does not mean that all the danger will have passed.
Computer model projections and official forecasts still show the potential for devastating amounts of rainfall in northwestern Luzon before the storm finally moves northward, toward Taiwan, by midweek.
390 Marikina residents (80 families) share the space at Bulelak gym #LandoPH | via @mikenavallo pic.twitter.com/oUWzsM3UQU— ABS-CBN News (@ABSCBNNews) October 18, 2015
"We're asking our countrymen not to become complacent," said Alexander Pama, who heads the government's disaster-response agency, explaining that rainwater could cascade down mountainsides and flood villages after Koppu passes.
That happened in low-lying villages in six towns in Nueva Ecija, near Aurora, where some residents were trapped on rooftops by floodwaters, said Nigel Lontoc of the Office of Civil Defense.
A teenager was pinned to death on Sunday by a fallen tree, which also injured four people and damaged three houses in suburban Quezon city in the Manila metropolis. In Subic town, northwest of Manila, a concrete wall collapsed and killed a 62-year-old woman and injured her husband, Lontoc said.
Three fishermen who had gone missing at sea were rescued off northern Bataan province, and three other missing people were found in an evacuation camp in Aurora's Baler town, he said.
President Benigno Aquino III and disaster-response agencies had warned that Koppu's rain and winds may potentially bring more damage with its slow speed. But Saludes, the government forecaster, said that there was less heavy rain than expected initially in some areas, including in Manila, but that fierce winds lashed many regions.
READ and WATCH: Rescue trucks make way to flooded hospitals, villages in Nueva Ecija http://t.co/6qACRqwbU1 #LandoPH pic.twitter.com/igTFPpmaKd— Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) October 18, 2015
Koppu, Japanese for "cup," is the 12th storm to hit the Philippines this year. An average of 20 storms and typhoons each year batter the archipelago, one of the world's most disaster-prone countries.
In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most ferocious storms on record to hit land, barreled through the central Philippines, leveling entire towns and leaving more than 7,300 people dead or missing.