Typhoon dodging with the Nanjing Martyrs

I knew it was coming. The night before I left Hangzhou I’d dreamt of deluges and floods, of trains being swept off tracks and being hounded by lightning strikes. It was summer, typhoon season, and the Philippine Sea was boiling up splendidly, sending swirling chaos towards China’s east coast just in time to leave me scrabbling to avoid it. Typhoon Vicente had already struck Hong Kong a few weeks earlier, leaving a force 10 storm’s-worth of damage and a massacre of dead umbrellas scattered across the city. Moving north, I thought I’d left all that behind.

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Typhoon Vicente: Dead Umbrellas Part II

So Typhoon Vicente came and went. It whipped it up a little but all in good fun. Then it was back on with the real business of work and the disappointment of relatively sedate weather.

Following on from Thursday’s Dead Umbrellas Part I, here, as promised, is the second installment. There were so many casualties lying around that I could have had 100 or more different photographs to show you here. At times, it almost resembled a brolly Passchendaele such was the horror of it all. But in true war photographer style, I’ve not only tried to document the suffering, but also give a sense of place and context to what I witnessed. The photographs that follow contain images some visitors may find disturbing.

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Typhoon Vicente: Dead Umbrellas Part I

<p style=”text-align: justify;”>The damage was more than I’d expected as I crawled out of bed and went to take a look at what Typhoon Vicente had left Hong Kong to remember it by. There were trees blown over and branches everywhere. Dustbins had been overturned and road signs knocked down. Hong Kong’s most powerful storm since 1999 certainly seemed to have done enough to warrant the first T10 warning issued in the territory for 13 years. But though Vicente may have won on points, Hong Kong had put up a decent resistance, and by the time daybreak came round, the city was still standing and slowly beginning to clear its head.</p> Read More →

Typhoon Vicente: The morning after the storm before

So Typhoon Vicente made a flying visit to Hong Kong last night. The first category 10 storm to hit the city in 13 years and, after three years of waiting, my first real taste of what this much-hyped typhoon business is all about. The fireworks only started around midnight. The T8 signal went up around 6pm, and as the storm intensified as it drew closer to Hong Kong, the rumours of a T10 were confirmed as the branches started flying.

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