MANILA, Dec 17: One of the strongest typhoons, Super Typhoon Rai, carrying torrential rains devastated southeastern Philippines on Thursday, claiming at least 17 lives and displacing 300,000 people. Rescue operations were underway in severely flooded regions on Friday. The death toll was likely to rise.

Also known as Odette locally, Rai is the 15th typhoon to hit the archipelago this year. The typhoon made landfall at Siargao island in the east, a tourist centre, on Thursday, packing winds of up to 260 km per hour with gusts over 300 km per hour. Power and communication outages hampered efforts to assess the extent of devastation as also the rescue operations.

Visayas and Mindanao regions were the worst affected. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said on Friday that 332,000 people were evacuated. Huge numbers of houses were destroyed in the storm. Rai was forecast to stay through across the Philippines the whole of Friday.

Travel by air, sea and road has been banned in central and southern Philippines. Thousands of travellers are stranded. Smaller towns along the coastline are the worst hit.

The rains had begun early in the week. In central Misamis Oriental province, the Agay-ayan river was overflowing, flooding streets and homes.

Super Typhoon Yolanda had killed more than 6,000 Filipinos in 2013 around Samar province in Eastern Visayas.

Tropical storms in the western Pacific region are called typhoons while in the east like in the American continent they are called the hurricanes. The Philippines is located in the Northwestern Pacific Basin which is the most active tropical cyclone basin on earth. One-third of the world's annual tropical cyclones occur here.