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Traffic starts to resume in province, Shanghai after warnings downgraded

Typhoon In-Fa, after making landfall in Zhoushan, Zhejiang province, on Sunday and swirling through Hangzhou Bay, made an unprecedented second landfall in the province at around 9:50 am on Monday in Pinghu. By then its maximum wind speed had diminished to around 100 kilometers per hour.

After making landfall, In-Fa was downgraded to a tropical storm. It was expected to move farther northwest and inland at 5 to 10 km/h, with its strength gradually weakening.

This marked the first time that one typhoon had made landfall twice in Zhejiang, according to the Zhejiang Meteorological Station. It is also the strongest July typhoon ever in Zhejiang, which has long been hit by typhoons in summer.

According to the China Meteorological Administration, a weakening In-Fa continued swirling northwest, entering Jiangsu province on Monday night, and it was expected to move northeast on Wednesday and moving on to the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean Peninsula on Friday.

The storm system has brought heavy rainfall that affected millions of people in East China, forcing major cities in the region, including Hangzhou and Ningbo in Zhejiang, and Shanghai, to cancel flights, reduce the speed of or suspend subway trains, and close expressways starting on Sunday.

In Yuyao county of Ningbo, strong winds uprooted trees and downpours drenched communities with knee-deep water earlier on Monday. From 8 am on Thursday to 5 pm on Monday, a monitoring station in Yuyao had received accumulated rainfall of 1,003 millimeters－a record for Zhejiang.

"We worked around the clock from midnight, when a breach occurred at a dam between two villages, with the breach widening to 1 meter, but, fortunately, we filled it with sandbags by 6 am," said Zhao Jinjiang, a police officer in Hemudu township.

As the storm system weakened, provincial authorities allowed traffic flow to resume.

At 9:35 am, a flight from Guangzhou, Guangdong province landed at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, marking the airport's resumption of operations.

The airport was scheduled to handle 410 flights on Monday, according to the airport authority.

As the storm weakened, most flights in and out of Shanghai's Hongqiao International Airport and Pudong International Airport resumed at noon on Monday. The airports had been closed throughout Sunday, a rare typhoon measure in Shanghai.

On Monday afternoon, Shanghai's meteorological authority downgraded the warnings for both typhoon and rainstorm to the lowest level as the strength of In-Fa weakened after its second landfall in Zhejiang.

Most sections of Shanghai's subway line running above ground and on elevated tracks, as well as the maglev train to Pudong airport, resumed service on Monday afternoon following a 24-hour suspension. For safety reasons, services continued to be suspended for some subway lines running above ground in coastal areas.

Heavy rain continued on Monday, but Shanghai police said that any traffic congestion during the morning rush did not last long.