By Manny Mogato
MANILA (Reuters) - A powerful typhoon bearing down on the Philippines may not be as destructive as feared since it has changed course and should only clip the far north of the archipelago later on Saturday, officials said.
Typhoon Parma, centred about 120 km (75 miles) east of the main island of Luzon and moving northwest at 17 km per hour, brought rain and strong winds to the Philippines' eastern seaboard, but there were no reports of casualties.
The storm system has so far largely spared Manila and other densely populated areas on the west coast where nearly 300 people were killed in flash floods a week ago from an earlier storm, Typhoon Ketsana.
A storm signal posted for the capital region overnight has been lifted, but officials warned nearly half a million people living in shelters in and around Manila after their homes were flooded last week to stay put.
"There is still a risk of rain," President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said on national television. "We ask the evacuees to stay one more night in evacuation centres.
Authorities in Taiwan issued a sea warning as Parma was likely to enter its southern waters in the next few days.
On the Philippines' east coast, about 2,600 people were left stranded because of impassable roads in the Bicol region and on the island of Catanduanes, relief officials said.
Troops are evacuating entire communities from the east coast and almost 100,000 have already been shifted to safer areas, officials said. Arroyo declared a nationwide calamity on Friday to allow local governments to access emergency funds and cap the prices of essential goods.
Officials said some 5.5 billion pesos ($115 million) in crops, mostly rice about to be harvested, were damaged by Ketsana last week. Parma is expected to hit rice and corn lands in the Cagayan Valley region in the north.
SERIES OF DISASTERS
The Asia-Pacific region has been hit by a series of natural disasters in recent days, including Ketsana that killed more than 400 in the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
Tens of thousands were also displaced in southern Laos and flash floods were reported in northern Thailand.
Two powerful earthquakes rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra, with the death toll likely to be in the thousands, and a tsunami battered American and Western Samoa, killing nearly 150.
Parma, packing centre winds of 175 kph (108 mph) and gustiness of 210 kph, was likely to make landfall in the far north of the Philippines, in the province of Cagayan, a mountainous and not heavily populated area, on Saturday evening.
It would be the strongest typhoon to hit the country since 2006, and officials had worried that more rains over Luzon could overwhelm the relief efforts in and around Manila.
"This is still a very strong typhoon," Prisco Nilo, a weather bureau official, said on television.
Nathaniel Cruz, the weather bureau spokesman, later told reporters: "There will be rains but we will no longer experience the same amount of rainfall that Ketsana dumped last week."
(Reporting by Manny Mogato; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Sanjeev Miglani)
