Few towns have recovered from the destruction caused by last week's typhoon [AFP]

Typhoon Lupit is predicted to hit the country on Wednesday and follows in the wake of two storms that have killed more than 900 people.

The government weather service said the outer bands of the latest typhoon, now packing winds of up to 175km an hour, could affect the north of the main island of Luzon.

The eye of the storm stayed nearly stationary for a few hours on Sunday, about 1,000km off Luzon's east coast, but could clip the island's extreme north later in the week, it added.

Prisco Nilo, a weather service chief, told a news conference: "Those in critical areas should be evacuated now that there is still time. It would be more difficult to rescue people in the middle of a typhoon."

Landslide risk

Colonel Ernesto Torres, spokesman for the National Disaster Co-ordinating Council (NDCC), said people living in coastal areas, near river banks, mountain slopes "and other landslide-prone areas should evacuate now".

Since Friday, Torres said, government agencies had been "prepositioning relief goods" in the sparsely populated Batan island group near Taiwan, the northern city of Tuguegarao and key population centres in the Cordillera range, which were hard hit by landslides during the previous tropical storms.

The weather service warned that seven dams in northern Luzon had been releasing water in anticipation of heavy rains brought by Typhoon Lupit.

Widespread flooding had killed 380 people and displaced 4.34 million others in and around Manila on September 26 as Tropical Storm Ketsana brought record rainfall to the region, the NDCC said in an updated toll.

Tropical Storm Parma hit northern Luzon a week later and hovered over the region for a week, triggering landslides and floods that left 438 people dead and displaced 3.8 million others, it added.

About 266,000 people remain in crowded evacuation camps more than two weeks later, and a bacteria-borne disease called leptospirosis has killed another 89 people in flooded areas since then, the health department said.

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