Aftermath.

Aftermath.

(A History of Hong Kong Typhoons with photos of the aftermath of the most recent one.)

We are boring people. We swim, we eat out now and again, and a couple of times a week I go and look at something. This week, however, was largely hijacked by a typhoon and an accident. We had a life up until Wednesday. Then, on Wednesday night, Peter had a weird dream. In his dream he was lying in a bunk bed talking to a man from Durham, telling him that his father came from County Durham, when he suddenly felt himself falling and to save himself, he threw himself the opposite way. I woke up due to a loud bang. Peter wasn't next to me in bed. I wondered if he had gone to the toilet and fallen, but I found him on the bedroom floor, entangled in bedclothes and with a cut above his eye. It turned out not to be a very bad cut, but there was quite a bit of bleeding. It gave us both a real shock. He also now has a black eye. We were meant to swim on Thursday, but I wouldn't let him go with an open wound.

By Friday we were on typhoon three. That's not all that dangerous in itself, but it means a typhoon is probably coming. I went out shopping for provisions and we got ready to baton down the hatches.

Later on Friday the signal went up to a typhoon number eight, that's getting scary, and then it went to a ten, that's the highest possible signal and normally really scary. We have experienced a couple of typhoon tens here.

I went out briefly when the storm was reduced to an eight. I shouldn't really have done this, but I felt I had been inside forever.

The first one was Typhoon York in September 1999. We lived in Fo Tan at the time on a mountain on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise building. We didn't know that buildings here are designed to sway in a typhoon. We were at the top and had our roof garden above us. Our chairs and the lid of the steel casing that protected our washing machine came hurtling past our window. We thought that the next thing that came down would go through the window. All our lights were swaying back and forth. We felt seasick and we were terrified. We sat in our tiny hallway, the only place with no windows, huddled together, waiting to die. The mess after that typhoon was terrible. There were trees down everywhere and lots of buildings and infrastructure had been damaged.

Paths were strewn with fallen branches and leaves.

Slippy pathway.

Slippy pathway.

The second terrible one, we have experienced, was Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018. That largely closed the whole of Hong Kong down for two days as workers battled to clear debris from roads. Many people's windows blew in during this typhoon. That must be terrifying and do massive amounts of damage to your flat. I remember walking down from school after Mangkhut and having to climb over and under downed trees to get to the MTR.

Fallen branches.

Fallen branches.

Some have already been heaped up for disposal.

Looking at the history of typhoons here, they are not to be taken lightly. In September 1874, years before typhoons were named, a typhoon struck Hong Kong and injured more than two thousand people. Some of them died. This same typhoon hit Macau more directly resulting in the deaths of five thousand people.

Strewn Paths.

Strewn Paths.

In 1906, again in September, a typhoon arrived here without warning. It sank lots of ships and boats. This storm killed around ten thousand people.

In September 1937 a typhoon generated an eighteen foot tidal wave and killed around eleven thousand people.

In 1960 Typhoon Mary lifted ships out of the sea and deposited them on the land. A hundred people died and eighteen thousand were left homeless.

Several trees were down.

Some had broken.

Broken tree.

Broken trees.

In September 1962 Typhoon Wanda damaged boats, killed four hundred and thirty-four people and left seventy-two thousand homeless.

In August 1971 Typhoon Rose brought dense fog with her, leading to several ship collisions and the sinking of a ferry with the loss of eighty-eight lives. Power lines were damaged and many people spent hours trapped in lifts.

In September 1983 Typhoon Ellen caused ships to sink or run aground. Ten people were killed and a thousand six hundred were left homeless.

The next one I already mentioned was Typhoon York.

This may have originally been on the road. These are quickly cleared.

Messy exercise area.

In July 2012 Typhoon Vicente struck. We lived here then, but had gone overseas. We had had the ridiculous idea of leaving a small upper window slightly open in our flat while we were away, thinking it would help keep the place aired. When we returned, the window was wide open and everything that should have been near the window was on the other side of the room. We initially thought we had been burgled due to the mess, but it was the wind and rain that the open window had let in. I even remember our brown leather sofa had turned green with mould.

In 2017 Typhoon Hato killed ten people in Macau and caused major flooding in coastal areas here. In one residential carpark in Heng Fa Chuen waters poured in and the cars began to bob around, banging into each other as they floated about. In this current storm all the drivers who use that car park took their cars out and parked round a nearby roundabout.

Terrifying Typhoon Mangkut was in 2018.

This is a seating area not far from our house.

This tree just missed the bench.

I'm glad I wasn't sitting there.

Or here

Trees are great for shade, but keep away in a storm.

The typhoon we have just experienced was called Typhoon Saola. It brought down trees and solar panels and caused two days of disruption, but even so it, fortunately, wasn't as bad as it was expected to be.

I had a wander around my local area when it had largely passed and took some photos. We were not in the worst hit part of Hong Kong but there was still damage, mainly to trees. Some parts of Hong Kong experienced flooding too.