BEIJING (AP):

At least 15 people were killed as Typhoon Sepat hit the Chinese mainland after more than 900,000 were evacuated as a precaution, state media reported yesterday.

Xinhua News Agency said a tornado, spawned from the typhoon, killed at least 13 people and seriously injured another six in Zhejiang province in eastern China.

The dead included a man who was killed when the van in which he was riding was knocked over by a landslide in Cangnan county in Zhejiang. Eighteen others in the van survived, Xinhua said.

Sepat hit the coast of Fujian province in southern China early yesterday morning, causing a landslide that killed two people and left one missing, Xinhua said.

Sepat later weakened to strong tropical storm, it said.

Evacuations

Earlier, the government eva-cuated nearly 540,000 people in Fujian, 300,000 in Zhejiang and 70,000 in Guangdong province, Xinhua said, citing emergency officials.

Xinhua quoted one villager in Zhejiang as saying the storm "tore down my mom's old house in no more than one minute".

Heavy rains caused by Sepat also led to a train station collapsing west of Fuzhou, Fujian's capital, causing the derailment of six carriages of a cargo train.

Some air traffic was halted in Fujian but has now resumed, it said.

Earlier, the storm, named after a Malaysian fish, knocked out power, washed out roads and overturned cars as it cut an east-west swathe across Taiwan. At least one person was killed in Hualien when a car overturned and fell into a steep valley.

Sepatleft three people dead and affected 542,000 people, mostly due to flooding, last week in the northern Philippines.

More than 3,500 people remained in evacuation shelters in the Philippines yesterday due to the typhoon, which damaged US$435,000 worth of crops, fisheries and roads, according to the government's National Disaster Coordinating Council.