It never actually made landfall, yet Typhoon Champi has left Taiwan with one of its biggest clean-up jobs in years. Forecasters now rank it as the most powerful storm anywhere on the planet so far in 2026, after it sustained winds of about 185mph at its peak last week.
What made Champi so disruptive was the path it took. Approaching from the east, the eye came within roughly a kilometre of the northeast coast, then bent south along the shoreline of Yilan County, looped back over open water and only afterwards headed north. Coastal gauges caught gusts near 227km/h. For one pensioner in Yilan, walking past his ruined banana trees the next morning, it had been “a sleepless night”.
Yilan also took the most rain, 650mm between Thursday and Saturday afternoon. Taoyuan and Hsinchu each passed 500mm and Taipei recorded close to 470mm. Taiwan’s Central Emergency Operation Center reported one death, a man dragged off a beach by waves on Liuqiu, a small island off Pingtung, along with 616 injuries, nearly all of them minor cuts and bruises.
Officials registered 9,027 separate incidents of damage, with uprooted trees behind 3,287 of them, and Taipei alone accounted for 1,282. At one point the lights went out in over 340,000 homes, close to 5,000 residents were moved away from slopes at risk of landslides, and nearly a thousand flights were scrapped on Friday.
Champi has since weakened to a tropical storm and is fading southwest of mainland Japan. Elsewhere the weather is not letting up: Cyclone Arnab is taking shape in the Bay of Bengal and is forecast to hit India’s east coast, between Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, by Wednesday, while Greece faces its fourth flood warning of the month.
