Summer is also typhoon season. But it's not that all the rain comes from typhoons. Summer will be rainy whether any typhoons come close or not. Typhoons form over the ocean every year, but they don't always hit us. Most will hit the Philippines, some will hit Japan or Taiwan, and pretty much every typhoon that is headed west will hit somewhere in China. But it's pretty hard to hit Hong Kong.
Whoever decided to build this city was smart. You have the natural harbor and mountains that make it interesting, and all of the economic advantages of international trade and opium wars, but two of Hong Kong's major advantages are the Philippines and Taiwan. Without them, we would be hit by multiple typhoons every year. I doubt Hong Kong would be the city it is today without that protection.
As it is, typhoons have to squeeze through a tiny passage to get to us. Almost every typhoon that collapses near here has already made landfall somewhere else. That makes them much weaker.
This typhoon season has been a little different. We have already had two tropical storms that slammed directly into us, Merbok and Roke, and one that landed close enough, Pakhar. That happens from time to time. Tropical Storm Roke slipped through our Philippines/Taiwan blockade. Pakhar slammed into the Philippines and slowed down before hitting us. Merbok was a little sneaky and formed west of the Philippines. It headed north, so there was nothing to protect Hong Kong.
But those were tropical storms. They bring a lot of rain, but this is the rainy season anyway. Hong Kong is not subject to flooding the way the Philippines and low lying parts of Mainland China are. Tropical storm winds are 75 mph or less. In a typhoon, it's the wind that really causes the most damage. We get tropical storms every year. Something we don't always get are typhoons.
On August 23, Typhoon Hato crashed right over Hong Kong and Macau before landing in Jinwan. It was the first time Hong Kong issued its highest warning system since Typhoon Vicente. That one caused a lot of damage. The streets looked exactly as you would expect streets to look after a super typhoon. Somehow, no one died.
Typhoon Hato was a little smaller, and not nearly as dramatic. At least in Hong Kong. I would like to say that the government learned from Vicente and made improvements to protect us, but we probably just got lucky.
Macau and Guangdong were not as lucky. Hato was Macau's strongest storm in 50 years. The army had to clean up debris. Government officials resigned. Ten people died. In the rest of China, a few hundred thousand people were left homeless and 19 people died. The damages were about US$3 billion.
You did not hear about Typhoon Hato on CNN because at the same time, Hurricane Harvey was hitting Texas. CNN is an American company, so obviously anything happening in the United States will always take precedence over anything anywhere else, and Harvey was definitely a newsworthy event. But it would be nice if CNN finally recognized that more than one news story can take place at the same time. They spent four straight days talking about nothing but Harvey. There was some information in there that most of us would have never known otherwise, but one of CNN's biggest problems is talking about the same thing over and over, even when there is nothing new to report. They will repeat everything they said five minutes earlier. In between updates, they could acknowledge that there are other countries besides the United States. If you get all your news from CNN, you probably have no idea that most of the people on this planet live nowhere close to Wall Street.
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