Originally Posted by dengxi:
Edit: TLDR for the below as after posting I realised it's a ridiculously long essay - I'm not saying HKO were right or wrong, just that (1) it's plausible they weren't 100% right and (2) I'd like to see more of their justification and insight into the risks... especially given the high costs pointed out in the SCMP article.
Nice video - interesting to see all those people out there on the streets despite the bad conditions.
The article on SCMP said that wind speeds of 100km/h shouldn't shut down HK. This article on Accuweather:
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weathe...n-phi/16359687 said that the sustained wind speed was around 93km/h at landfall in Yangjiang. It sounds reasonable that we could cope with the wind shown in the video without shutting down the whole of Hong Kong, but I agree this is debatable.
I also agree with you it could easily have been worse, but also with moving that it seems we had a fairly healthy buffer between us and the storm.
Now you apparently don't agree with moving and me, fair enough. You also say that HKO got it right, again fair enough. Despite your "let it go" I didn't actually say they'd got it wrong (at least in my latest post!), and you seem to follow this more closely than I do so I'd probably give you and them the benefit of the doubt.
What I did say I'd like to see, and I think you'd probably be on board with this, is a little more outreach from HKO explaining the risks and actual danger. Even if HKD 4bn is 100 times the actual cost, you could still spend 1% of the cost and get somebody to do some reports that let us know e.g. they put up a T8 because there was a 30% chance that it would speed up and veer right and spin faster and that could have caused abc and xyz damage; and even though that didn't happen we still had 27 fallen trees and the cargo ship down.
If they could publish more of their reasoning it could actually mean people who wanted to go to work but didn't because of the signal could make it in or people who had to work outside could better evaluate the risks. E.g. if what you say is right and it could have hit Hong Kong hard within an hour, someone travelling an hour to work should check the HKO bulletin right before they go, or those guys outside could make sure to check in once an hour to make sure they don't get caught outside even when it seems safe to work.
I admit these ideas aren't that well thought out, but if I were the HKO I'd want to take a bit of leadership and not have the SCMP and random guys on forums like you and me second guessing whether they did it right or not. They could do a lot more to educate the public than just calling a T8 from 0140 to 1340. There's middle ground between "HKO got it 100% right" and "they shouldn't have called a T8 it was a millpond" (not that moving said that, but that's how some people seemed to have interpreted it).