KIMBERLY WILCOX | senior staff writer
Evacuations in anticipation of typhoon saved hundreds of lives.
Thousands of homes were damaged when Wipha hit the shores of East China Wednesday Sept 18. Only seven deaths were recorded due to preventative evacuation of 2.7 million people. Three missing people continue to be unaccounted for.
The storm caused flooding in many valley regions of Zhejiang, and landslides have also occurred throughout the area in which Typhoon Wipha first made her appearance.
Due to the weather, the women’s World Cup had to reschedule games on Wednesday. Several matches were moved to Thursday for convience.
In Shanghai, schools, ferries, and other transport offices were closed on Wednesday due to high winds and rain. Everything re-opened on Thursday and the children were said to have gone back to school with clear skies over head.
Earlier reports had called Wipha one of the strongest storms to threaten China.
Once she came ashore in the Zhejiang province, she began to decrease in power and was demoted from a typhoon to a tropical strom.
Wipha did succeed in disrupting power to more than 100 communities. Preliminary estimates have placed damage costs at 638 million dollars.
Meteorologists predicted Wipha to be one of the worst typhoons to hit China in the past few years. But Typhoon Winnie, which killed 236 people in 1997, is still regarded as the worst.
Typhoons are common in China where the weather is prone to storms during the summer months.
A typhoon in China is similar to earthquakes in California. They occur frequently, therefore weather services were ready.
Although Wipha was predicted to cause great devastation, the immediate evacuations of people in the threatened areas only allowed destruction of homes, instead of hundreds of lives. 
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