Typhoon Kompasu
Posting Date: 02 September 2010
Location: West Pacific
Peril: Windstorm
UPDATED 2 SEPTEMBER: Typhoon Kompasu made landfall close to the North-South Korean border as the equivalent of a category 1 hurricane late on Wednesday, 1 September.
As of 03:00 UTC on Thursday, 2 September, the center of Typhoon Kompasu was located close to 38.6N 128.0E, approximately 90 miles (150 km) northeast of Seoul, South Korea and 125 miles east-southeast of Pyongyang, North Korea; just north of the Korean border.
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) reported that, over the previous 6 hours, Kompasu had been tracking towards the northwest with a forward speed of approximately 25 mph (40 km/hr), and had maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 km/hr) – the equivalent of a weak category 1 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (SSHWS), with gusts of up to 90 mph (150 km/hr)
Kompasu made landfall to the north of Seoul, south of the Korean border, sometime before 00:00 UTC on Thursday. At landfall, Kompasu was the equivalent of a weak category 1 hurricane on the SSHWS with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 km/hr), having reduced in intensity somewhat over the previous 24 hours from a low category 3 storm.
According to reports there have been three fatalities in Seoul, where trees, power lines and street lights have been downed. Power has been cut off to more than a million homes and more than 100 international flights have been delayed or cancelled. Services on subway lines and railway routes have been temporarily suspended.
Forecasters are predicting that up to 6 inches (150 mm) of rainfall accumulations may be bought to parts of the Korean peninsula during Thursday.
Previous to its Korean landfall, Kompasu impacts have been felt across the region, 86 oil workers at an oil platform in the Pinghu oilfield in the East China Sea were evacuated and in Japan, over 200 domestic and international flights were cancelled – affecting over 15,000 passengers.
The system is expected to exit the Korean peninsula in the next few hours into the Sea of Japan, before weakening to the equivalent of tropical storm on the SSHWS and tracking towards northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido, Japan. As Kompasu tracks over the Sea of Japan, it is expected to become absorbed into the mid-latitude westerlies and begin extratropical transition, reaching Japan (in approximately 36 hours’ time) as a much weaker extratropical cyclone.
Non-life insurance penetration in Korea is around 7%, but penetration in the household market is significantly lower, with only 640,000 household policies in relation to 16 million households (in 2008).
RMS will continue to monitor Kompasu.
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