Typhoon Hato leaves 16 dead after lashing China
THE death toll from Severe Typhoon Hato rose to at least 16 yesterday after the storm left a trail of destruction across southern China, blacking out Macau’s mega-casinos and battering Hong Kong’s skyscrapers.
Eight died in the gambling hub of Macau, where images showed cars underwater and people swimming along streets. A man was killed by a wall that was blown down, another fell from a terrace and one was hit by a truck.
The Macau government said two bodies were found in a flooded car park yesterday, and that two more died when they were trapped in the basement of their shop. Details of the remaining death were not immediately available.
Footage published yesterday on the website of Apple Daily showed water gushing into an underground car park, with people wading through neck-deep water littered with debris as one man shouted in panic. It was not clear if it was the same car park where the bodies had been found.
“I have never seen Macau like this since I came here in the ’70s,” a taxi driver aged in his 50s who gave his name as Lao said. “It’s like they were trying to gamble with their luck,” Lao said adding that authorities had reacted too slowly and did too little to alert residents of the coming storm.
Debris was scattered on roads and a shipping container was washed up on its side in front of a temple. Streets were lined with trash and shattered glass and residents holding plastic buckets queued for water from fire hydrants.
In Hong Kong, Hato sparked the most severe Typhoon 10 warning, only the third time a storm of this power has pounded the financial hub in the past 20 years.
In the neighbouring southern Chinese province of Guangdong, at least eight people have died, state broadcaster CCTV reported, while around 27,000 were evacuated to temporary shelters, the official Xinhua news agency said. Nearly two million households were briefly without power.
CCTV said four of the mainland deaths had occurred in Zhuhai, three in Zhongshan and one in Jiangmen.
In Zhuhai which borders Macau, some 275 homes had collapsed, with the typhoon causing an estimated $826 million in damage, according to state-run Beijing News.