Deadly typhoon heads for Vietnam after killing at least 114 in Philippines | BBC News
10 Video Views·Nov 8, 2025
Typhoon Kalmaegi has devastated the Philippines, killing at least 114 people and leaving hundreds missing. The storm is now intensifying as it moves into the East Sea, heading towards Vietnam. It is forecast to bring heavy rain, strong winds, flash floods and serious landslides to the central coastal provinces.
Comments are disabled for this video.
Hello and welcome. A state of emergency has been declared in the Philippines after typhoon
Galmagui battered central regions. At least 114 people have been killed with an even larger number
reported missing. The typhoon is the biggest tropical storm so far this year. The state
of emergency allows government agencies more power to access emergency funds and the delivery
of essential goods and services to those in need. Our Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head
gave us the latest. Well they're coping with enormous amounts of destruction in a number of
towns on Cebu island. I mean Cebu city itself is one of the largest cities in the Philippines.
Parts of the city have been badly affected. Mostly low-income areas where housing is built of quite
flimsy materials. If you look at some of the images there some of these neighborhoods have
been absolutely wiped out. There is literally nothing left but rubble and debris. Now the
problem with this typhoon wasn't just its strength it was the amount of water it was carrying. It
dumped the equivalent of one month's worth of rainfall in just 24 hours. The Philippines is
mountainous. It's very deforested so that water just ran straight off the hills down the valleys
into urban areas. I mean if you look at images of it of people that people on upper floors were able
to film at the time it actually looks rather like a tsunami. You've got these powerful churning
waters charging through these streets and literally lifting up cars even shipping containers and
tumbling them around because they're on the washing machines. It was enormously destructive
and now they're having to go through and look at these areas which have been wiped out. But all the
other areas too where this huge carpet of mud has been laid down and they're going to have to clean
that up. But they're really I think still in the process of just working out where all the damage
has been and whether there are still bodies in there. There are still more than 100 people who
are reported missing on top of the death toll. And how does declaring a state of emergency change
things? Well it's a state of calamity. That's a very specific Philippines definition and it's
quite commonly declared. It basically authorizes central government funds to be released to help
local authorities assist those who've been badly affected and to assist also in the reconstruction.
So because the Philippines is so subject to natural disasters you do tend to hear about
states of calamity quite frequently. And although this has been an enormously destructive storm
it's not unprecedented. It's not unusual. Every year the Philippines is hit by at least 20 typhoons
and usually one or two of those will have these levels of destructive power.
The difference is mostly from my experience it tends to be landslides that really cause human
casualties and the sort of damage to people's homes in previous typhoons where you get a whole
hillside sliding away. In this one it was these tremendous sort of flood waters that just went
through at such speed and really caught people out. All of them require months and months of
reconstruction and there's another typhoon heading there as we speak.