Powerful cyclone batters Taiwan and southern China
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Typhoon Ragasa has made landfall in southern China, where nearly two million people have been evacuated in preparation for its arrival.
It comes after authorities said at least 17 people had been killed and more missing in Taiwan after a lake burst on Tuesday, causing severe flooding in the island's east. We hear from a reporter in Taiwan
Also in the programme: Syria's interim president is due to address the UN General Assembly, making him the first Syrian head of state to do so in nearly 60 years; and for the first time, doctors have used gene therapy to significantly slow the progression of the deadly, degenerative disease Huntington's.
[Photo shows a drone view of buildings and fields submerged in flood waters in Guangfu, Hualien County, Taiwan on 24 September 2025. Credit: The Warthog Air Squadron/Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.1 | Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:12.4 | We're coming to you live from London. |
| 0:14.3 | I'm James Menendez. |
| 0:15.7 | And we're going to begin today in the South China Sea. |
| 0:18.4 | And what is the most powerful tropical cyclone of the year so |
| 0:21.7 | far? Typhoon Ragasa, which has been roaring westwards over the last few days, with winds of up to |
| 0:27.3 | 240 kilometres per hour. That's 150 miles an hour, the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane. |
| 0:39.4 | That's the sound of a storm surge smashing through the doors of a hotel on the southern |
| 0:43.2 | coast of Hong Kong's main island, sweeping one man off his feet and causing panic in the lobby. |
| 0:48.7 | Earlier, the typhoon brushed past Taiwan, where the impact was much more serious. |
| 0:52.6 | A lake up in the hills burst its banks, |
| 0:55.6 | sending a huge volume of water barreling down into the town of Guang Fu in Hualien County, in the east of |
| 1:01.3 | the island. This woman in the town said she and her family spent the night stuck on the second |
| 1:05.6 | floor before a rescue team arrived in the early morning. |
| 1:18.2 | We jumped into a pickup truck with officers from the local authority and just began fleeing for our lives. |
| 1:19.1 | Honestly, if we hadn't left early, the water was really intense during that short drive. |
| 1:24.1 | I thought we were going to tip over. |
| 1:25.5 | The pickup truck was packed with people. |
| 1:28.3 | The officers were shouting along the way, telling the remaining residents that the water was |
| 1:32.3 | coming and to just drop everything and quickly go to higher ground. Honestly, I can't believe |
| 1:38.6 | that the kind of scenes that we saw on TV during a tsunami in Japan, that those scenes were |
... |
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