Why another Hong Kong typhoon is mostly same old, same old for seaside Heng Fa Chuen

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Typhoon Hato, the previous signal 10 storm to hit Hong Kong, whips up waves into the Heng Fa Chuen seafront on August 23, 2017. Photo: David Wong

Published: 12:15am, 20 Sep 2018Updated: 1:55am, 20 Sep 2018

As global warming gets more intense, we are only going to get more and worse monster storms mauling Hong Kong (“Typhoon Mangkhut officially Hong Kong’s most intense storm since records began”, September 17).

There was worse flooding in Heng Fa Chuen than during Typhoon Hato in August last year. The main artery, Shing Tai Road, was thigh-deep in storm water and the shopping centre was a mud bath, not to mention the underground car park, flooded yet again.

The cause of the flooding was simply that the onslaught of the windswept waves, helped up-slope by the shape of the sea wall, far outstripped the capacity of the drainage system, perhaps by a hundred times or more.

Wind force was fortunately correctly predicted by the architects, so that the windows and balcony doors largely remained intact, although storm water managed to squish through between the gaps created in the sliding doors by the ferocious winds.

But power supply failed for more than 16 hours and with it went the drinking and flushing water supplies, and of course the lift service – leaving elderly people stranded aloft.

Watch: Typhoon Mangkhut hits Heng Fa Chuen

One way of preventing a recurrence of such devastation could be to turn ourselves into another Netherlands where, storm surge or not, the waves never climb over the barriers. Less of an upheaval would be to lay a line of outboard wave-breakers to collapse the wind-fetched waves before they reach the sea wall.