Millions of people in the Philippines sought shelter in churches, schools and other makeshift evacuation centres today as Typhoon Hagupit bore down on the disaster-weary nation.
The storm, which would be the strongest to hit the Southeast Asian archipelago this year, is expected to impact more than half the nation including communities devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan last year.
Authorities said millions of people were pouring into evacuation centres ahead of Hagupit's expected landfall on Saturday night or Sunday, having learnt the lessons of early preparations after Haiyan.
"Everyone here is gripped with fear," Rita Villadolid, 39, told AFP as she sat with her family and hundreds of other people inside a stadium in Tacloban, one of the cities still yet to recover from Haiyan.
Elsewhere in Tacloban, a coastal city of 220,000 people on the eastern island of Leyte, people began flooding into churches and schools with little more than bags of clothes and rice.
Haiyan, the strongest storm ever recorded on land with winds of 315 kilometres an hour, killed or left missing more than 7,350 people as it tore across the central Philippines in November last year.
Hagupit weakened slightly today and was downgraded from a super typhoon category as it tracked towards the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean, generating maximum winds of 195 kilometres an hour.
But Hagupit was still predicted to be the strongest storm to hit the Philippines this year, bringing storm surges more than one storey high to many coastal areas, according to state weather agency Pagasa.
Hagupit's giant front of more than 600 kilometres meant about 50 million people, or half the nation's population, were living in vulnerable areas, Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman said.
