Super Typhoon Megi dumped heavy rains over the Philippine capital on Tuesday after killing 10 people, creating a wasteland of fallen trees in the north and sending thousands scrambling to safety in near-zero visibility.
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s it moved away from the Philippines, the strongest cyclone in years regained strength over the South China Sea on Tuesday while heading toward China and Vietnam, where recent floods unrelated to the storm already have caused 30 deaths.

Surging currents on Vietnam's flooded main highway Monday swept away a bus and 20 of its passengers, including a boy pulled from his mother's grasp.

In China, authorities evacuated 140,000 people from a coastal province ahead of the typhoon, which Chinese officials said could hit the southern coast Thursday. Heavy rains have already lashed Hainan.

Megi packed sustained winds of 140 miles (225 kilometers) per hour and gusts of 162 mph (260 kph) as it made landfall on Monday in the northern province of Isabela, felling trees and utility poles and cutting off power, phone and Internet services.

Its ferocious wind slightly weakened while crossing the mountains of the Philippines' main northern island of Luzon.

Iron-sheet roofs on many of the houses were blown away.

Blowing over the open sea on Tuesday, the typhoon's massive outer bands still stretched over much of western Luzon and drenched the capital, Manila, and surrounding areas, snarling traffic and sending about 1,000 people out of their homes into temporary shelters.

In Isabela province, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of the capital, more than 8,000 people rode out the typhoon in sturdy school buildings, town halls, churches and relatives' homes.

Roads in and out of the coastal province were deserted and blocked by collapsed trees, power lines and debris.

At least 10 deaths were blamed on the typhoon, including three men who drowned in a fish pond where the typhoon made landfall, and a man who had just rescued his water buffalo then slipped and fell into a river in Cagayan province, near Isabela.

A woman was pinned to death when a tamarind tree crushed her house and injured her child in Kalinga province, and a security guard died after being struck by a pine tree in nearby Baguio city, officials said.

In Pangasinan province, a mother and her 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son who were pinned to death when a tree collapsed on their house, regional disaster official Eugene Cabrera said. Another man was killed by lightning in the same province.

At least nine were injured in the region by falling trees, collapsed roof and shattered glass, officials said.