On Monday evening, Hong Kong was hit by a typhoon. The storm slammed into the city, snapping trees and power lines, leaving thousands without electricity. As the winds raged, torrential rain hammered the city, bringing major travel disruption.
The typhoon, named Nida, was Hong Kong’s first major typhoon of this year and it hit with winds gusting up to 165 kilometres per hour (100 miles per hour). In preparation for the storm, the government had ordered the closure of the majority of schools and many businesses were also shut. Later, as the storm raged, over 300 flights had to be cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at the airport.
Fortunately Hong Kong escaped any major damage from this storm, largely due to its infrastructure. Whilst the storm was undoubtedly strong, the sturdy skyscrapers of the city are built to withstand winds far higher than this. In the past, Hong Kong has been devastated by typhoons, and the city planners have ensured that future generations are as sheltered from them as much as possible.
As the city has evolved to withstand the storms, the forecasts have evolved as well. Typhoons approach Hong Kong from across the sea, from the south or the east, and historically the problem was that there were very few people at sea who could warn of their arrival. In earlier decades, meteorologists had to determine if a typhoon was coming based only on weather observations from the Philippines and isolated ships in the South China Sea.
Often observations from ships were inaccurate, as meteorology was often a hobby of the sailors and they hadn’t received any formal training. If a weather observation came in from a ship in the South China Sea that would imply that severe weather was in the vicinity, meteorologists in Hong Kong had the difficult decision of whether to include the data and issue a forecast for severe weather, or whether to ignore it and hope it was a mistake.
Of course, sometime there were no reports from ships at all and then the weather forecasters had even less information. It is this sparseness of information that is believed to have led to the disaster which struck the city on September 18, 1906. On this date residents had barely any warning that a typhoon was about to hit the city. In fact, early in the morning, the Hong Kong Observatory forecast a reasonable day with moderate winds and showers. Just before 8am the Hong Kong Observatory issued an alert that a typhoon was within 300 miles of the colony and by 9am the typhoon was raging.
The impact of the storm was so sudden that it’s estimated that 10,000 unprepared people perished and a thousand small boats were sunk. In the coming days, dozens of people were plucked from the water miles from shore, many of whom were clinging onto the wreckage of destroyed boats.
It’s highly unlikely that such an immense storm could creep up on the city unannounced these days thanks to the huge improvements that there have been in forecasting the weather. One major step forward was the launch of weather satellites, the first of which was put into space in the 1960s. Suddenly meteorologists were able to see the weather, and at a glance they could tell if there was a typhoon approaching Hong Kong. As you could imagine, the forecasts improved immeasurably.
Fortunately Hong Kong is hit by storms fairly infrequently. This is fairly surprising, after all the city lies directly on the shores of the South China Sea. Even the latest typhoon, Typhoon Nida, didn’t hit the city directly. The eye of the storm hit the Dapeng Peninsula, which is about 45 kilometres to the east of the city. When Nida made landfall, it was a relatively weak storm; the sustained winds of approximately 135 kilometres per hour made it the equivalent of a category 1 hurricane on the 5 point Saffir-Simpson Scale. This is the scale used to measure the strength of hurricanes in the waters around the Americas and a category 1 is the weakest classification.
Despite this, Typhoon Nida is believed to be the strongest storm to have hit Hong Kong since 1983 when Typhoon Ellen struck the city. Ellen had a more destructive impact on Hong Kong than Nida, partly due to the slow speed that the storm was moving. Typhoon Ellen battered the former British Colony with hurricane force winds for over five hours. The typhoon also spawned the second tornado ever to hit the city, which also contributed to the damage. In total, Ellen killed eight people and left thousands homeless.
Clearly the islanders are lucky to avoid the majority of most severe typhoons, but equally they are lucky to live in such a prosperous city. This has ensured that the flimsy huts of yesteryear have almost entirely been replaced by sturdy concrete structures, which are designed to withstand severe storms. Therefore it is no surprise that the more rural locations in neighbouring Guangdong suffered larger damage from Typhoon Nida than Hong Kong did, despite the famous city stealing the headlines.



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