Two years ago, heavy rains submerged Hong Kong, turned roads into high -speed rapids, sinking cars and flooded goods, making it one of the most expensive weather events in the city. When another period of record -breaking rain was wet to the city last month, the damage and disruption were relatively low.
“I was looking outside the window, watching the rain coming down, and I expected more effects that I saw it,” said Andreas Paren, a weather expert, who was in the city for a forum on a heavy rain this week. Other participants abroad also remarked how soon Hong Kong returned to the business like a normal: They gathered for drinks within a few hours of rain.
Severe storms received the highest daily rainfall, but it was also against the city’s rapid flood management strategy: In the last two years, Hong Kong has doubled its annual costs on storm water drainage to an expected HK $ 3.17 billion (7 407 million) to get a warm -end.
Other regions have also spent beautifully spent in their struggle to eliminate the waters of the storm. Tokyo has a global flood defense system, Singapore has spread to the drainage infrastructure, and the Netherlands continues to rely on its barriers, dams and air -powered pumps. According to the United Nations, but globally, the climate -proofing has slowed down and according to the UN, the difference between the desired and desired finance is at least $ 187 billion a year.
For now, the investment of billions in wider infrastructure in Hong Kong has maintained the full anger of natural disasters. Long before the climate dangers entered public awareness, this very important but less well -known work began. Most of Hong Kong is dense packs and standing, or made at the foot of steep slopes. The average average of this city is 2,400 mm (94.5 inches) – New York City is doubled – and predicting tropical rainfall is notorious. As a coastal city, the rise of the storm and the rising sea level put extra pressure on its drains.
“This combination of factors is unique to Hong Kong,” said Huan Feng Duan, a professor of hydraulics and water resources at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “The problem of flooding very fast means that it also requires very high quality of research and engineering.”
Now, so far, high temperatures have been at risk of high rainfall, which requires further improvement in Hong Kong’s extreme climate reaction.
The department to operate this effort is drainage services, which oversees about 2,800 km (1,700 miles) of storm water drains – which is higher than the city’s public road length. In almost four decades since its inception, the DSD has invested more than $ 32 billion in HK for $ 32 billion of drainage to reduce the effects of the flood. Now it is not enough.
“The heavy rain of 2023 was a waking call for us,” said DSD director Rango Mok. “We have to take many different measures at the same time.”
Mock said, though massive engineering projects will still form a “first line defense” against sinking-at the moment the department has a budget of $ 17.1 billion for storm water projects.
For this purpose, the drainage has increased the plans to fight its floods over the past two years. It has identified about 240 barriers across the city, and when heavy rains collide, the number of emergency reaction teams has been doubled to disperse them. Improved monitoring, it has installed 100 battery -powered flood monitoring sensors across the city that can ping up quick warnings, and intend to gradually enhance the network. It is also working with experts to develop a trained machine learning model to remove floods from CCTV images. And he received nine mobile pumping machines to quickly clean up the big obstacles.
It seems that there are fruit from this point of view, Mock said: All the notified floods last year were completely cleaned in less than two hours.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Chief Development Strategist Christine Loh and earlier for the atmosphere, Christine Loh, said, and earlier for the environment, the city’s extraordinary secretary, Christine Loh, said, “The DSD is a compulsory change, a compulsory, a compulsory.”
The private sector is also accelerating its game. The property was a traumatic shock to the unidentified investor Link Reit when Delos flooded one of its goods in September 2023. It was not that the company had ignored the potential dangers-it recently completed the evidence of flooding and heat risks to each of its more than 150 features. But with the worst flood damage, the goods that ended up was never flagged through its danger models.
“Did this model fail, or were we dealing with something different?” Calvin Caravan, Managing Director of Risk Governance and Risk Governance, said the link. “The answer is that we were dealing with a whole confluence of the worst situation.”
Risk models failed to imitate the perfect storm of events: record -breaking rain, a subway station flood gate is diverting flood water and the mud run off from a nearby construction site. In the basement surface, shops were drowned 3 meters (10 feet) under water, which closed the entire floor for about two months and resulted in millions of insurance claims.
The link realized that its danger model could not see any assets of isolation – they should calculate the changes in the surrounding environment that can create new risks. It took steps to reduce these risks, including keeping new flood doors, real -time flood sensors and re -designing the drainage premises for high performance. According to Kuan, the link has spent HK $ 8 million on flood measures in the last two years, compared to three to five years ago, compared to HK $ 500,000.
Railway operator MTR Corporation also learned a lesson from rain two years ago. According to a spokesperson, it has set up flood sensors on more than 30 high risk station and on its entrances, and now there is a protocol to plant flood boards and activate flood doors when the Hong Kong Observatory highlights its extremely intense rainfall warning signals.
Finally, even the best flood defense system will fail. The challenge for governments is openly discussing that matters will go wrong, while still encouraging the public to take steps to evaluate their flood threat and reduce losses, Dutch flood risk consultation HKVV LiJN director Bass Colin said.
“It is a challenge for the government to say that we cannot prepare everything,” he said. Of course, they like to say that you are safe, but everyone knows that something can be wrong. ” “This is not a failure. It’s just clear what you can expect.”
Top picture: A pedestrian in the flood waters during heavy rains in Hong Kong in 2023. Photo Credit: Justin Chen/Bloomberg
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Flood climate change
