Inside Out | How Hong Kong’s visionary flood control failed the test of climate change
- Hong Kong’s engineers were praised worldwide for their vision and ambition, after undertaking two grand flood containment projects
- However, it should be clear from the devastation last week that the alarming progress of climate change is leaving us unprepared for the next 50 years
In September 1983 – almost exactly 40 years ago – I flew into Hong Kong looking for an apartment ahead of opening the Financial Times’ first bureau in Hong Kong.
I had missed Typhoon Ellen by a week, but was still shocked by the chaos and damage inflicted – 10 people had been killed and over 300 injured. Most of all, I was shocked as property agents led me around storm-damaged apartments with shards of glass still littering the floor, inviting me to pay astronomical rentals far above any housing budget the Financial Times might have been willing to afford.
There was something lame about Chief Secretary Eric Chan Kwok-ki’s alibi at a media briefing on Friday: “For this heavy rain, it was once in 500 years. It was so big and so sudden and the predictability was so low.”
And if he had checked rainfall records, he would notice that levels had been climbing over the past century. According to the Observatory, the first record was set in 1886, with 88.4mm in one hour; in 1966, the new record was 108.2mm, and in 2008, 145.5mm. Last Thursday’s record of 158.1mm is unlikely to stand for long, in a trend that is surely predictable and could have been forecast by any climate activist.