Six dead as typhoon smashes into Macau, HK

HONG KONG — Typhoon Hato left five dead in the gambling hub of Macau yesterday as it brought chaos and destruction to the enclave after sweeping through neighbouring Hong Kong, where one man also died.

Local media showed severe flooding had left cars underwater and people swimming in Macau’s streets, with the territory’s mega-casinos running on back-up generators.

The Macau government said one of the men died after being injured by a wall that was blown down, while another fell from a fourth-floor terrace and the third fatality was a Chinese tourist hit by a truck. Details about the others who died were not immediately available.

Residents took to social media to complain about citywide power and mobile phone network outages.

Mr Brian Chan, 31, said the authorities had failed to give enough notice of the impending storm and were not properly prepared, describing the territory as “totally lost” in the typhoon.

The water supply was also limited, the authorities said, and 50 flights cancelled from its international airport.

By evening, parts of Macau were still without power. “Some have no tap water supply. The city looks like after an attack,” Mr Harald Bruning, editor of the Macau Post Daily, told AFP, describing it as the worst typhoon he had experienced in 30 years.

Hurricane winds and heavy rain had earlier hit Hong Kong, leaving an 83-year-old man dead after he fell into the sea, police said, and more than 80 people injured.

The typhoon shut down the stock market and forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights in the worst storm the city has seen for five years.

More than 20 flights plying the Singapore-Hong Kong route were disrupted, while the two Singapore-Macau flights were rescheduled.

Hato caused Hong Kong to suffer an estimated economic loss of between HK$4 billion (S$696 million) and HK$8 billion, said market analysts. Mr Dylan Bryant, Hong Kong manager and head of North Asia at insurance firm Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, said according to internal research, the economic impact on Hong Kong from a typhoon classified as No 8 or above was about HK$4.29 billion.

The figure was calculated by combining the business losses of major sectors in a large scale typhoon.

However, Chinese University associate professor of economics Terence Chong Tai-leung put the economic loss at about HK$8 billion, based on the average value of the gross domestic product generated in one day.

Meteorologists raised Hong Kong’s most severe Typhoon 10 warning as Hato hit, for only the third time in the past 20 years. Hato, which means “sky pigeon” in Japanese, sent metres-high waves crashing into Hong Kong’s shorelines with flooding knee deep in some areas.

“I’ve never seen one like this,” Mr Garrett Quigley, a longtime resident of Lantau island to the west of the city, said of the storm. “Cars are half-submerged and roads are impassable with flooding and huge trees down. It’s crazy.”

As the storm moved away, the observatory gradually reduced its warning signal to a Typhoon 1, the lowest level, although it said there would still be strong offshore winds and the rain continued.

Hato made landfall at noon in the southern mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai. Numerous flights and trains were cancelled in Guangdong province, with Shenzhen’s International Airport particularly badly hit. Thousands of residents along the Chinese coast were evacuated and fishing vessels were called back to port.

Maximum winds near Hato’s centre were recorded at a destructive 155kmh as it continued to move west across Guangdong in the general direction of Hainan island. AGENCIES