Typhoon Mangkhut
Last month Hurricane Florence began slowly battering the east coast of the United States. Although weakened by the time it hit it was slow moving and caused irreparable damage to large parts of the Carolinas. On the other side of the world another storm was working its way west across the Pacific towards the Philippines. Although called by different names a hurricane and a typhoon are more or less the same. Hurricanes form in the Western Hemisphere while typhoons form in the Eastern1. At some 550 miles wide Typhoon Mangkhut was the largest storm of the year. Called a super typhoon at it’s strongest and equivalent to a category 5 hurricane Mangkhut first hit the northern part of the Philippines and then continued west and smashed into China2. On Sunday, September 16th the eye of the storm swept by south of Hong Kong but the sheer size of it meant the storm itself easily hit southern Guangdong Province. A typhoon warning was put into place Saturday and many things, including school, cancelled for Monday. With a long weekend I settled in to try to weather the typhoon.
This was about all I could see during the typhoon so I didn’t really know what was going on.
And weather it I did. On Saturday I picked up some of the stuff I needed to cook on Sunday and with the food and water I already had around I hoped for the best. The weather started to get bad sometime during the night Saturday and by the time I woke up on Sunday it was raging full force. I decided to cook my weekly soup after I woke up in case the storm got worse and we lost power or something, which proved prescient after we got a message in our work Wechat group saying that the government was going to cut off the water at 3. I’d finished the soup about half an hour earlier and around three tried to wash everything real quick while there was still some water. The pressure from the sink seemed weaker than normal but the water didn’t ever actually die on me. After that I kept it off assuming that we had none. However the water was fine when I went to shower around 6 or 7. Either the water never got turned off to where I live, my complex gets its water somewhere else, or the water had been turned back on.
When I wasn’t cooking I kept myself busy elsewhere. I did some work on stuff for the blog and played a bunch of video games. We had electricity the entire time. There were a couple times the lights flickered but other than that nothing happened. The air conditioner ran fine. There were no problems with the gas when I was cooking. By the evening the storm had largely moved on and everything had calmed down outside.
It didn’t seem too bad just glancing out of my apartment either.
Other than the low water pressure one time, some flickering lights, and some extra loud storm noises nothing really seemed out of the ordinary. This led me to believe, during the storm, that it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe. The only hint that it may have actually been bad were the occasional videos people would send in different Wechat groups but its hard to tell where those videos are actually from. It wasn’t really until the next day I saw the extent of the damage.
On Monday morning I ventured outside and saw what I been thankfully shielded from the day before. There were the branches and trees that you see down after any storm but I quickly came across entire roads that were blocked, sometimes by one or two huge trees and sometimes by so much brush that I couldn’t see the other side of the road. I went out around noon and the cleanup was already well underway. Wood chips showed were there had been trees across the road that were already cleaned up and trucks and small armies of workers were buzzing about trying to make Shenzhen usable again. When I was out all the major roads I saw were already cleared and within a couple of days the smaller roads were cleared as well. But even into October there were still some large trees and stumps down on sidewalks and in apartment complexes and some areas of sidewalk were still wrecked from when trees tipped over and pulled them up. Had I gone out Sunday night after the typhoon had subsided I may have seen quite a few more downed trees and would have had much more trouble walking around.
While the flora in the city didn’t seem to fare too well I didn’t see too much structural damage besides the sidewalks. Pictures online showed boats that had been grounded, scaffolding collapsing, and buildings full of blown out windows in Hong Kong but I didn’t see any of that here (or maybe those pictures were fake or of an earlier storm). I saw one building with some air conditioners that had been pulled off the wall and were dangling by their cords but nothing like what I saw online in the days after the typhoon. It could have been that the part of Shenzhen I live in got lucky and escaped major damage or it could have been that Shenzhen just wasn’t close enough to the storm to take the brunt. The radar maps I saw had the eye of the storm passing south of Hong Kong, which meant that Shenzhen was farther away from what I assume was the worst part of the storm than Hong Kong or Macau, which supposedly took a huge beating. The huge diameter of the storm meant that Shenzhen was hit but that it was blessedly spared the worst. And for that, I’m thankful.
It was both exciting and terrifying to see nature’s wrath up close although I was thankful enough to be spared the full wrath of the storm. Hopefully typhoon season has wrapped up here and South China will be safe until at least next year.
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