(Image source: BBC ) BY NATHAN BYRNE ANCHOR JIM FLINK At least 40 people are reported dead or missing and nearly 150,000 have evacuated the southern Philippines where Typhoon Bopha has made landfall on the island of Mindanao. T he BBC reports heavy rain and wind gusts of 130 miles per hour . “ … the storm has uprooted trees, torn the roofs off of houses, it’s set off landslides and flash floods. It’s now on the move towards the center of the country.” At first, evacuations were voluntary. But a reporter for Al Jazeera says the government eventually ordered people in harm’s way to leave their homes . “They were determined not to see the same high casualty rate as last year when over 1,200 people were killed in this area during a tropical storm.” Meteorologist Jim Cantore with The Weather Channel says the way this storm started is rare. “This thing formed at 3.6 degrees north latitude. Storms don’t usually form that close to the equator. But this one has a little help from what we call a Rossby wave, which actually induced the circulation out of this.” And a meteorologist for CNN adds — December isn’t typically typhoon season. “If you talk about Mindanao in the month of December, I mean, they have typhoons once every 10 years. But they’ve never had one of this size. They’ve never had a super typhoon move into Mindanao.” According to Reuters, the storm is expected to move into the South China Sea by Thursday.