468Likes
No, in a poxy airport lounge where the smokers lounge is a 2 km walk away.
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16-07-2013, 04:02 PM #151
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16-07-2013, 04:11 PM #152
Thanks virago. Of course, I've been watching this one since Saturday but actually the picture has been quite confused....there is some low pressure just South East of Hainan and the interaction might be interesting...anyway, you can more or less ignore the HKO track for at least until tomorrow IMO!
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16-07-2013, 04:36 PM #153
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16-07-2013, 05:46 PM #154
I am also in the "typhoons are beautiful" camp. Yes I have been in typhoons, yes I have been flooded by them, yes I have helped people recover from the damage. They are still beautiful though. As is a thunder storm. As is a tornado. As is a volcano - and I know people who have lived through one of those. I don't understand how people can not see the beauty of nature even when the result is destruction. I think the tiger example was good - beautiful creatures but killers.
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16-07-2013, 05:50 PM #155
Would love to watch a typhoon from the ISS. *sigh*
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16-07-2013, 06:05 PM #156
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16-07-2013, 06:14 PM #157
9 dead 3 missing from Soulik for comparison
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16-07-2013, 06:23 PM #158
From the South China Morning Post
February 27, 2005
The wave from nowhere About 15,000 people died in Hong Kong's 'tsunami' of 1937
The most chilling aspect is that every typhoon approaching the region carries the seeds of a repeat disaster
It came in the dead of night and stole away more lives than any storm recorded in the city before or since. At the time, they called it a tidal wave - but if the term had been coined by then, it might have been remembered as Hong Kong's tsunami.
Fifteen thousand people - 5,000 on land and 10,000 on boats around Hong Kong - perished in 1937, when a typhoon triggered a wave that sent a 9-metre wall of water racing down Tolo Channel and raised the water level in Victoria harbour by 5.5 metres.
Entire villages around Sha Tin and Tai Po were wiped out, an orphanage full of sleeping children and babies was destroyed, a railway line was washed out and 1,200 passengers on board a luxury cruise ship had to be rescued as their vessel foundered off Green Island.
On Hong Kong Island, hundreds died as water coursed through harbour-side streets, electrical fires razed buildings and the highest winds recorded plucked fish from the water and flung them against windows 27 metres above ground.
In an age when natural disasters were an almost annual occurrence in Hong Kong, this was a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions - a night when the forces of nature conspired to deliver the deadliest and most unexpected of blows.
The most chilling aspect of the calamity, however, according to a retired academic who has researched the disaster in the wake of the December 26 tsunami, is that it could happen again today with as little warning as on the night of September 1, 1937.
No tsunami warning system would guard against it because rather than an underwater earthquake, this wave was triggered by meteorological factors - the piling up of water around an area of low pressure caused by a typhoon.
Leung Chik-wing, former head of geography at the University of Hong Kong, said the risk of a repeat of 1937 exists every time a typhoon bears down on the territory and that the more land is reclaimed with inadequate sea defences, the greater the threat becomes.
"It may only happen once in a lifetime, but once in a lifetime is enough," Mr Leung said.
Tropical storms did not have pet names in those days, but there was no undue alarm in Hong Kong as what would later be referred to as "the Great Typhoon" edged across the sea from the Philippines in late August.
Even as the sun set on Wednesday September 1, it looked as if the storm was going to bypass Hong Kong altogether, according to the Hong Kong University Engineering Journal published three months later.
"It steered rather an erratic course and finally, after giving every indication of passing well south of the colony, suddenly swerved and made almost straight for us," the author recalled. "The sunset of Wednesday evening was in no way remarkable. No highly coloured sky heralding the approach of a storm. After sunset there was a display of lightning towards the north and north-east.
"All this was contrary to the rules and no wonder the unfortunate fishing fleets were taken unawares. How were they to know that the typhoon had decided to raid the colony by surprise? Even the staff at the Royal Observatory were for a time puzzled by these unfriendly tactics."
As darkness fell and the city began to slumber, the sea was stirring ominously. When the typhoon came to within 160km east-southeast of Hong Kong, it suddenly switched direction and accelerated to the "abnormal speed" of 17 -21 knots (32-40km/h).
While it closed in on the territory, two meteorological factors combined to trigger the devastating waves that were to engulf Hong Kong at 1am on September 2.
The wind speed within the typhoon climbed to 146 knots (269km/h) - the highest ever recorded anywhere up to that date - while the air pressure at the eye of the storm fell to record levels.
As a result, when it made landfall, the area of low pressure was sucking towards it water from the high-pressure area outside, forming a colossal wave and pulling it towards the shore.
"The surrounding area of high pressure pushed the water against the low -pressure area," Mr Leung explained. "This always happens in a typhoon, but the extent to which it happens depends on how low the pressure is within the storm - and it can happen out at sea, of course."
The wave reached its greatest height of 9 metres as it entered the Tolo Channel. "The channel is a bottleneck shape and water entered it at a fast speed," Mr Leung said. "The water couldn't all get in at once so it piled up and up, layer by layer."
The devastation was absolute. Thousands died as the wave washed people out of their sleep and to their deaths from single-storey Chinese homes in the then undeveloped agricultural districts of Sha Tin and Tai Po.
A railway line connecting Hong Kong to the mainland was swiped sideways as a mile of embankment protecting it from the sea was washed away by the force of the gigantic wave. It would take 10 days and thousands of hours of peasant labour before trains could run again.
"Whole villages in Tai Po and the surrounding areas were swept away, swallowed by the wall of water," Mr Leung said. "Fortunately, there were no railway trains running because it was 1am, otherwise many more would have died.
"In Sha Tin and Tai Po, there were only Chinese-style village houses at that time. They were not very strong. You could say they were very similar to the village houses around Phuket that were destroyed in the December 26 tsunami."
About 1,000 people died around Victoria Harbour, where one witness account from the time describes the water rising more than 5.5 metres above normal levels as the wave surged through.
"Water came up as far as Des Voeux Road," the witness wrote. "The post office basement and shops in Connaught Road were flooded. On the mainland, sea water reached the lower end of Nathan Road. The force of the wind caused small fish to be blown from the sea on to buildings 90 feet 27 metres above the ground."
An official report by Charles Jeffries, who was the director of the Royal Observatory at the time, noted: "To a great many people it was a night of real terror. To pile horror upon horror a fierce fire broke out at 2am in Connaught Road, West Point, and raged for several hours, gutting about 10 buildings."
But it was in the seas around Hong Kong that the storm was to take its greatest toll, with around 30 ocean-going liners and vessels, including the 18,675-tonne Conte Verde from Italy, sunk or washed ashore.
"The typhoon could not have come at a worse time," Mr Jeffries wrote in his report.
"Owing to the trouble in Shanghai the Japanese invasion , the harbour was unusually crowded with ships, many of them tied up for an indefinite period."
The Aberdeen fishing fleet of about 40 junks was lost at sea, with around 450 lives lost and five survivors amazingly picked up at sea days later by a P&O cargo liner. The luxury liner the Van Heutsz was wrecked against the rocks of Green Island but all 1,200 on board were saved.
A magazine writer who witnessed the devastation told how "hundreds of fishing vessels and small Chinese houseboats were splintered against the sea wall and the rocky coast. Screaming coolies were catapulted into the seething water, many to be drowned, a few to be saved by a lifeline of rope-tethered police and customs officers who strove spunkily but hopelessly against the storm".
Sunrise on the morning of September 2 cast light on a catastrophe that would leave lasting scars on Hong Kong. As he wrote his report months later, Mr Jeffries lamented the "complete disappearance of bird life" and described the storm as a "black and evil memory".
Today, the events of 1937 are a lifetime away. As he pores over a collection of yellowing reports at his home near his old university, Mr Leung is researching a disaster he was born three years too late to see - an event as distant in time to modern Hong Kong as the shores of Sri Lanka, where the December 26 tsunami struck, are in geography.
But Mr Leung warns that unless Hong Kong builds up proper sea defences and does more to guard reclaimed land against tidal surges, the death toll next time could be higher.
"We must be aware. Hong Kong has already had a tsunami, and it can happen again."
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16-07-2013, 07:14 PM #159
I had no idea!
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16-07-2013, 07:26 PM #160
Quote
Originally Posted by virago:
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