At least 21 people were killed by the storm, the Red Cross said, with the eastern island of Samar worst hit, but it caused far less damage than feared.
Thousands of people are heading home after about a million people were evacuated from vulnerable areas.
The city of Tacloban, which bore the brunt of Super Typhoon Haiyan last year, has emerged relatively unscathed.
Albay province, which evacuated more than half its population, has called for those people to go home.
After spending three days at a school in Polangi, families are packing into small military trucks, holding one or two plastic bags with the essentials they brought with them.
They worry about the state in which they'll find their homes but many are most worried about their rice fields, their only source of income.
One woman reached her house and found it flooded and uninhabitable. For her that means at least one more night in the evacuation centre.
Hagupit has been nowhere near as powerful as Typhoon Haiyan - known as Yolanda in the Philippines - which tore through the central Philippines in November 2013, leaving more than 7,000 dead or missing.
In Tacloban, Hagupit blew away roofs and flooded streets, but the area has escaped the wider devastation of last year.
"There were no bodies scattered on the road, no big mounds of debris," local woman Rhea Estuna told the Associated Press by phone from Tacloban. "Thanks to God this typhoon wasn't as violent."
Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez told the BBC that the immediate task was assessing damage to the temporary shelters in which some people have been living.
He said that the weather was good now but that high tides were making it harder for waterways to drain, despite work to clear debris.
UN official Orla Fagan told Reuters that a lot of people have begun returning to their homes. "In Tacloban this morning, the sun is shining, people just started going back," she said.
The storm made its fourth landfall on Monday night, hitting Batangas province some 100km (60 miles) south of Manila with winds of roughly 100km/h.
At its height, as it approached land on Saturday, gusts of up to 250km/h were recorded.
Lessons learnt help Philippines avoid high death toll
As Typhoon Hagupit churned across the Philippines on Sunday, residents of the eastern part of the island nation expressed relief that they had joined the hundreds of thousands who had evacuated to safer ground.
Ms Eleanor Llaneta, 60, decided to follow the advice of her neighbourhood captain and leave her home in Albay province, on the south-eastern tip of Luzon Island, on Friday, more than a day before Typhoon Hagupit made landfall.
In past years, she might have considered staying put, but a year’s worth of news about the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,300 people dead or missing after hitting the Philippines in November 2013, convinced her that prudence was the best course. “We only knew about storm surges after Tacloban,” said Ms Llaneta, referring to the city that Haiyan left filled with mud, debris and dead bodies just over one year ago.
Typhoon Hagupit weakened into a tropical storm on Monday, leaving at least 21 people dead, and forcing more than a million people into shelters, but sparing most of the central Philippine region still haunted by last year’s monster storm.
While the worst was over in central island provinces, where the sun peeked out yesterday after days of stormy weather, Manila and outlying provinces braced themselves as Hagupit blew nearer with maximum sustained winds of 105kmh and gusts of 135kmh.
Forecasters said the storm was expected to slam into a Batangas provincial town about 110km south of Manila by nightfall. Although considerably weaker from its peak power, the storm remains potentially dangerous and could still whip storm surges that could overwhelm coastal villages, they said.
In Albay province, Ms Llaneta and about 560,000 others were evacuated ahead of the storm, said local officials. As of 4am on Sunday, more than 1.2 million people had been evacuated nationwide, Ms Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine Red Cross, wrote on Facebook.
Hagupit is expected to hopscotch across islands as it makes its way west. Maximum sustained winds near the centre had dropped to about 160kmh by Sunday morning, but the slow churn over the nation could dump large amounts of rain, setting off floods and mudslides.
The Mayon volcano rises over Albay, adding a further risk of landslides to the wind, floods and storm surges that often follow typhoons. In 2006, Typhoon Durian dumped heavy rain on the area, setting off mudslides that buried villages below Mayon and killing more than 1,000 people.
One significant development in disaster preparedness in the Philippines is a much wider knowledge of the threat from storm surges, the walls of water pulled along by typhoons that can quickly flood low-lying coastal areas. In Tacloban last year, a wall of water from Typhoon Haiyan ripped across a peninsular neighbourhood known as San Jose, crumpling cement houses and causing many deaths.
An assessment of that disaster by a German government-funded sustainable development agency said many residents in Tacloban, where the storm surge was the cause of most of the fatalities, had not been familiar with the risks and did not evacuate. “Serious warnings and more effective evacuations along the coastline could have saved many lives,” the report said.
In the year since Haiyan, residents have been exposed to much more discussion about the risks of typhoons, and evacuees in the city of Legazpi said that had contributed to their willingness to leave their homes.
Tuesday 9 December 2014
http://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/lessons-learnt-help-philippines-avoid-high-death-toll-typhoon
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30370012
