Incredible videos capture fury and devastation of Super Typhoon Haiyan

Takahiro Nakanishi, a Japanese medical student studying in the Philippines, had quite the shock waiting for him when he woke up last Friday morning and opened the door to his bedroom. The lashing winds from Super Typhoon Haiyan had smashed in the windows of his apartment, and were howling through his living room. Nakanishi quickly retreated to his room, but he resumed filming after the storm had passed.

CNN's Andrew Stevens was there with a team as well, capturing the effects of the devastating winds and intense rainfall, as well as the rising waters from the storm surge pushed onshore by the storm.

The scenes after the storm, filmed by Nakanishi and many, many others show the incredible destructive force of this typhoon. This one, recorded for RT.com, is just one example:

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Typhoon Haiyan, which was named Yolanda in the Philippines, was packing wind speeds of around 315 km/h at maximum and only slightly less than that when it made landfall. This far surpasses the sustained wind speeds of a category 5 hurricane, and they push into the magnitude of a EF4 tornado.

It has been rated as the most powerful typhoon ever to hit the Philippines, plus the second deadliest ever to make landfall in the country (the deadliest apparently being Tropical Storm Thelma in 1991), and its wind speeds put it near, if not at the top of the list of most powerful storms ever recorded.

(Image courtesy: NASA/NOAA)

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