Typhoon Nina (PAGASA: Sisang)

The sky that tightened in a week of rain

By the last week of November 1987 the western edge of the Pacific felt different. The ocean was still warm enough to feed a storm, and shipping reports and satellite imagery showed a gathering disturbance east of the northern Philippines. For people along the coast it began as rain that fell longer than usual — an inconvenience at first, then a warning.

Meteorologists tracked the swirl. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center and Japan Meteorological Agency logged the system as it organized, and when the swirl crossed into the Philippine Area of Responsibility it received the local name Sisang from PAGASA. The international community dubbed it Nina. From the moment forecasters marked its center, there was a quiet, mounting certainty: this was no ordinary squall. It was a compact engine of wind and rain moving toward islands and coasts that had seen storms before but not always with enough warning.

The question that settled over coastal towns was not only where Nina would make landfall, but how the country’s oldest vulnerabilities — low-lying rice paddies, wooden houses on stilts, fragile fishing fleets — would stand up to a storm that arrived at the end of harvest season.

A warm sea that would not let it die

Late-November cyclones in the western North Pacific have a rhythm of their own. Ocean heat content, steering currents, and pockets of low vertical wind shear create a narrow window when a disturbance can organize quickly. In those days the tools were more limited than today: fewer satellites, slower communication, forecasting that relied heavily on regional observation networks.

Between November 25 and November 28 the disturbance consolidated into a tropical storm and then a typhoon as it tracked generally west-northwestward. Advisories and warnings went out from regional centers; PAGASA, noting the system had entered its area, alerted local officials and communities with the name Sisang. For fishermen and farmers, those names were not technicalities — they carried the weight of past losses and the need to make quick decisions about boats, livestock, and shelter.

The storm’s path would intersect with one of the region’s most significant complicating factors: land. Northern Luzon is rugged. Mountain ridges shred cyclones’ wind fields and disrupt organization, but they also wring moisture out of clouds, turning wind events into concentrated, destructive rainfall.

When the mountain met the wind

Around November 29–30 Nina approached and made landfall on parts of northern Luzon. Observational reports from the period vary about exact locations and timings — a common feature of storms moving across broken island terrain — but the effects were clear. Coastal towns faced high seas and strong gales, while inland valleys felt the storm as a different beast: rain that sat over ridges and then plunged down river valleys.

For small communities the damage was immediate and literal. Rice paddies, at the end of their season in many areas, were scoured and submerged; mud and debris choked irrigation channels. Wooden homes on stilts that had weathered monsoon storms before suddenly showed their limits: collapsed roofs, sagging walls, and soaked possessions. Roads and bridges that tied villages to market towns were washed away or buried by landslides. In some instances vessels at sea were overwhelmed by squalls and swells, producing maritime casualties that would be tallied in days to come.

Because the typhoon crossed land, Nina weakened. But that was only a pause. After its passage over Luzon the system emerged into the South China Sea with enough structure to reorganize and continue on a west-northwest track.

The second act: gathering again on open water

Typhoons do not always behave like a single, neat event. After Nina’s interaction with Luzon’s terrain it found the warm waters of the South China Sea. Sea surface temperatures and ambient conditions allowed the storm to re-intensify in part, and its rainbands later brushed or struck Taiwan with heavy showers, particularly across southern and eastern areas. For Taiwan, which sits in Nina’s later path, the greatest threats were flash floods on hillsides and swollen rivers that can turn steep terrain lethal in minutes.

Then, in early December — around December 2–3 by most observational summaries — Nina reached the southeastern coast of China. Provinces along Fujian and parts of Guangdong saw storm surge, elevated seas, strong winds, and heavy rainfall. As the cyclone pushed inland, it rapidly lost cohesion; inland friction and terrain dissipated its circulation over several days. But floodwaters, landslides, and the damage left behind did not vanish with the storm’s circulation: they became the immediate work of rescue teams and neighbors.

Seventy-two hours that rearranged lives

When storms end their physical sweep, the human accounting begins. Contemporaneous reports and later summaries of Nina’s impact vary, which is common for multi-country events before the era of instant, consolidated reporting. What remains consistent across sources is the pattern: lives lost to floods, structures damaged or destroyed, harvests ruined, boats lost, and tens of thousands displaced.

Aggregate fatality estimates for Nina fall into the low hundreds across the Philippines, Taiwan, and southeastern China combined, with hundreds more injured and some people reported missing in immediate aftermath accounts. Country-level tallies differed between agencies and press outlets at the time; official numbers were revised in the weeks that followed as rescue teams reached isolated communities and municipal registries completed their counts.

The economic toll, likewise, was substantial but not a single tidy figure. Reported losses cluster in the tens to low hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars (1987 USD) when the affected countries’ damages are aggregated. In the Philippines, flood-damaged rice paddies — a critical economic and food-security loss — and the destruction of rural housing made up significant portions of the total. Coastal Chinese provinces reported damage to ports, fisheries, and low-lying farmland. Livestock losses and ruined harvests amplified the human cost with long-term effects on household incomes.

Displacement was immediate and visible. Evacuation centers housed thousands. In many villages, families lived for weeks under tarpaulins or in school gymnasiums, waiting for roads to clear and for the slow business of repairs to begin.

Hands in the mud: the scramble to respond

Disaster response in 1987 depended on layered effort: local barangays and village committees, municipal emergency services, national agencies, and, where needs exceeded domestic capacity, international aid. In the Philippines, coastal and floodplain evacuations were carried out with urgency. Coast guard and naval units assisted at sea, conducting maritime rescues and moving supplies into affected zones where roads were impassable. Local volunteers and firefighters waded into mud and currents to reach trapped households; hospital emergency rooms filled with the injured.

Non-governmental organizations and international agencies supplemented national relief with food, medical supplies, and logistical help. In China and Taiwan similar patterns unfolded: municipal authorities organized sheltering, search and rescue, and initial damage assessments; where fishing fleets suffered losses, the economic consequences reverberated through small ports and markets.

The first weeks after Nina were also a test of information flows. Without the same speed of communication available today, local officials sometimes operated with delayed situational awareness. That meant rescue priorities had to be adjusted on the fly as new reports reached coordination centers.

The slow arithmetic of rebuilding

Recovery after typhoons is measured in months and years. Streets are cleared of debris and broken boats, but rice must be replanted, homes must be raised out of saturated ground, and bridges must be rebuilt to restore market access. Governments deployed reconstruction funds, and compensation programs were activated to varying degrees, depending on local budgets and international assistance.

In agricultural communities the timeline was harsh: a lost harvest is not only lost income, it is a cliff-edge that pushes households into debt or dependence. For many, government aid and NGO assistance provided a bridge, but not a return to the pre-storm baseline. Infrastructure repairs — roads, bridges, irrigation channels — were prioritized where they would reopen commerce and relieve isolation, but these projects were expensive and slow.

Nina also fed a longer conversation about preparedness. The storm joined a sequence of late-season typhoons that emphasized weaknesses in early-warning dissemination, coastal evacuation planning, and flood-control measures. Over subsequent years, regional meteorological agencies and civil defense authorities invested in improved forecasting technology, better communication channels, more robust evacuation protocols, and community preparedness programs. Those changes were not the result of a single storm but of many events and accumulated pressure to reduce future losses.

Reanalysis, memory, and the lessons that stick

With the benefit of time, scientists and historians revisit storms to refine tracks, intensities, and impacts. Nina’s lifecycle — from formation east of the Philippines around November 25–26, through land interaction with Luzon on November 29–30, to its re-entry into the South China Sea and final landfall on China’s southeastern coast in early December — fits the typical late-season pattern for the region. The storm’s impacts also remind us why that pattern matters: even a system that weakens over land can deliver deadly rain and trigger cascading hazards like landslides and river floods.

Data from the era were later revised in some official tallies, and casualty and damage figures published in newspapers were adjusted as more complete assessments were compiled. Those revisions are normal for pre-digital reporting eras and underscore a simple truth about disaster statistics: they arrive imperfectly and improve with time and on-the-ground accounting.

Which lessons have endured? Better observational assets, faster dissemination of warnings, clearer evacuation triggers, and investments in flood control and coastal defenses all trace part of their rationale to storms like Nina. Communities that rebuilt also adapted: some strengthened homes, others shifted planting calendars, and many municipal officials updated contingency plans. Yet vulnerabilities remain — because economic constraints, geography, and climate mean coastal and riverine communities will always face risk from an unpredictable ocean.

A map of weather and memory

Typhoon Nina — Sisang to the people who first named and felt it — was not the deadliest storm the region has known, nor the most expensive. But in late 1987 it was a potent reminder that weather can rearrange a year’s work, a village’s harvest, and a family’s roof in the turn of a week. It passed over open sea, over islands and mountains, and through small towns whose names do not always appear in national reports. Its record is written in the torn thatch and corrugated metal of coastal homes, in fields left unharvested, and in the municipal logs of evacuations and relief.

For those who lived through it, Nina is part of a longer history of storms that have pushed governments and communities to build better early-warning systems, to plan evacuations more decisively, and to prepare shelters that can hold not just bodies but dignity. For historians and meteorologists, it is a case study in how late-season cyclones in the western Pacific can behave: quick to organize, variable in intensity, and capable of inflicting outsized damage through rain as much as through wind.

The storm passed. The work remained: to count, to clear, to repair, and to shape systems that make the next storm less devastating. In the quiet years since, the lessons from 1987 have been folded into policy, technology, and memory — and into the cautious conversations that coastal communities have with the weather as each season turns.