Sanderson was visiting the American Baptist station at Chaoyang, southwest of Swatow, when the storm struck on Wednesday night, August 2. Her account in The Colby Alumnus the following winter walks the reader through the night hour by hour: bamboo awnings torn from the veranda by ten o’clock, the window beside her bed blowing in at midnight with a crash of glass, army cots dragged into the hallway, the Chinese women and children of the compound holding the front door shut by main force as the house shook around them. The unidentifiable rolling sound they could hear for hours turned out, by morning, to have been their own veranda being torn loose and smashed across the yard.
Then the ocean came in. The four-foot seawall between the compound and the lagoon had given way under the storm surge, and salt water was now swirling under the door. “Abbie, that is the ocean,” Emily Miller said, and one of the Chinese women bent down and tasted the water to confirm it. They retreated upstairs and held the windows the rest of the night. By dawn the compound chapel, which had been serving as a hospital, was reduced to two walls; an enormous junk had been driven through it, and several patients drowned in the debris. Across the bay in Swatow city, the body count passed three thousand within days. The August 1922 typhoon killed an estimated fifty to sixty thousand people across the region and remains one of the deadliest tropical cyclones on record. Sanderson came through it without injury and was back at the Kakchieh school for the fall term.