Macau and other parts of southern China have recently fallen victims to a massive, undulating storm in the form of Typhoon Hato that appeared around Wednesday noon and has since been outpouring lashes of rain along with powerful, strong winds. This has resulted in twelve deaths with about more than 150 people reportedly injured as the city remains flooded with rainwater and mass power cuts to the count of more than a million households and even in hospitals and casinos, Macau being infamous for its prominence in gambling.
Over 27000 people have so far been rescued amid cancellation of over hundreds of flights and shutdown of shops, schools and offices. People have been displaced and are missing along with loss of millions of dollars of property. The roaring Typhoon and extensive floods have left cars submerged and rescuers are trying to evacuate those trapped beneath. In the mainland and neighboring areas of Macau like Guangdong, four more deaths have been listed so far according to China’s Xinhua news agency.
Since more than two decades, this has been the third time that the typhoon Hato has raised signal 10 warning, where several metres-high waves were seen gushing through Hong Kong’s shorelines and people trying to pass through muddy waters that had been roads two days back. A tropical cyclone warning has since been issued by Hong Kong Observatory.
Economy is running on a record low in the country with outage in mobile phone networks, shutdown of businesses, stock markets and the functioning of airports and cancellation of train services. A leading daily in China reportedly claimed that the economic destruction in the country could be to the score of 1.02 billion dollars.
Wednesday afternoon saw the typhoon attack Zhuhai, a city in south China, and even after thousands had already been evacuated to temporary shelters before Hato arrived, the damages run deep as debris piles up, trees are uprooted and high-rise winds of reportedly upto 207 kilometres per hour are barreling onto buildings and skyscrapers, making scaffolds collapse and breaking windows and doors. Local media reports and images have confirmed how roads have turned into pools of garbage and dirty floods and people are kayaking on the knee-deep streams of water while lack of water supplies in homes aggravate the perils of the residents. July to October are usually recorded as the months when typhoons hit Hong Kong but winds, storms and rains of this intensity are rarely seen in the territory.
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