Terrifying videos show Super Typhoon Meranti flipping fences in Taiwan
Super Typhoon Meranti, the strongest storm on Earth this year and one of the most powerful typhoons on record, hit the southern tip of Taiwan on Wednesday morning.
According to reports, in anticipation of Super Typhoon Meranti, some 1,500 people were evacuated, but two people were injured by early morning. The power was knocked out across more than 260,000 homes, while hundreds of flights and train services were cancelled.
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Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said Meranti's winds were the strongest logged in the southernmost coastal town, Hengchun, in the 120 years that it's been keeping track.
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The storm, which intensified quickly over Monday and Tuesday to become a Category 5 storm, hit the tiny Philippine island of Itbayat earlier.
Super Typhoon Meranti reached an extraordinary peak intensity on Tuesday morning eastern time, becoming the strongest storm recorded anywhere on the planet this year, with estimated maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour.
It is also the strongest storm in the Western Pacific since Super Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in 2013.
On Wednesday, residents and storm chasers in Taiwan posted terrifying footage from the ground of Meranti coming through the south of Taiwan, in Kaohsiung and Hengchun.
In some of the footage, you can see the torrential rain coming down at a horizontal angle from the winds. The gusts flipped fences and overturned trucks.
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Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
