Videos show destructive power of storm as winds of over 135 miles per hour lash port city and its neighbor to the north.
Early September brought two large natural disasters to Japan, with Typhoon Jebi slamming into the Osaka area on September 4 and an earthquake rattling Hokkaido just two days later. Since then, Mother Nature has given Japan a break, but things weren’t so peaceful elsewhere in Asia last weekend.
Typhoon Mangkhut, the strongest storm on record for 2018, reached Hong Kong on Sunday, after causing landslides and other damage in the Philippines resulting in over 60 deaths. When Mangkhut arrived at Hong Kong, its winds were blowing steady at roughly 170 kilometers (106 miles) per hour, and severe gusts were as strong as 223 kilometers (139 miles) per hour.
It can be hard to mentally grasp how fast those speeds are, given that they’re far beyond what most of us will ever experience behind the wheel of a car or other vehicle open to the outside air. Videos taken in the city during the storm, though, show just how terrifyingly powerful Mangkhut was.
It wasn’t just plant life that was blown about, either. Here we see two pedestrians in Shenzhen (Hong Kong’s neighbor to the north) trying to make their way through the rain, only to have their umbrellas turn into sails.
▼ A father bravely comes to his son’s aid as they struggle to remain upright against the winds.
The local authorities designated Mangkhut as a class-T10 typhoon, the highest level by which it rates storms. In the last 60 years, only 15 typhoons have received such a classification.
▼ Mangkhut was no less intimidating when viewed from afar.
▼ The winds were so strong that here they can be seen causing an entire apartment high-rise to sway like a tree.
Construction crews in Hong Kong often erect scaffolding made out of bamboo while working on buildings. The multi-story frames are an iconic part of the city’s urban landscape, but here we see one ripped and away and falling towards the street 10 floors below.
▼ The storm uproots a tree and the surrounding sidewalk in Shenzhen.
After passing through Hong Kong, the storm made its way north to the neighboring province of Guangdong, requiring over 2.4 million residents to evacuate. Incredibly, no deaths have been reported in Hong Kong, though more than 200 people sustained injuries requiring medical attention.
Mangkhut is now continuing to weaken as it moves further inland, with the Hong Kong Observatory reporting its sustained wind speeds have dropped to 75 kilometers per hour, and the organization expects it to further dissipate throughout today and tomorrow.
Sources: Jin, CNN, Hong Kong Observatory, Bloomberg