A Bit of a Blow

We just had a bit of a blow here - well actually it's still going on, the 'stay at home' signal remains hoisted after close to 12 hours, but should be coming down soon. Severe Tropical Storm Fengshen made an almost direct hit on Hong Kong, bringing gale-force winds and torrential rain. Luckily for us, she lost a lot of power after hitting The Philippines, where she ripped through the inner islands and Luzon, leaving a trail of devastation and horrific loss of life.

This is our first of the season and it can only, and quite possibly will, get worse. We haven't had a hurricane-force storm (called typhoons here) for many years and we're well over-due. Perhaps this was just a little warning of things to come. The direction of this one meant one corner of my building was very exposed and I thought my kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans were going to pop into the apartment. I wasn't that happy about my bedroom air-con either, which sits above my bed, as they have been known to get blown in. For a lot of people, they haven't been here long enough to have known the horror of living through one of those force 10 storms. I hope none of us do in the season ahead. Being high up as I am, and with large exposed window panes (which are great for the view but a real worry during storms) it's never a comfortable feeling sitting through these things.

Apart from anything else, there are very heavy rain bands associated with this storm and our landslip warning is up again. Quite honestly, we've had enough rain to last us the summer, already, with almost three weeks of continuous sky juice. On May 12th, we had torrential rain all day and almost 7 inches fell in just one hour that morning. If only we could send that to those places under drought-alert.

End of weather report, back to your normal viewing now :)