Category: 台風 / Typhoon

It’s been pretty quiet all day today. A steady rain most of the time but no torrents or wind. Both of my restaurants have been on normal schedule today. No damage at either shop and only some leaks at home. We got off pretty easy compared to some people.

I’m no expert, but the current radar and satellite images for Krosa show that the storm is losing organization and breaking up. Things have been mostly quiet here for a while now. When Krosa hit the east coast instead of keeping on its northwesterly heading it decided to turn left and headed south down the coast. Predictions were for it to loop back around and head towards Taipei again, but instead it looks like it is breaking up instead. I think it’ll be a fairly calm day Sunday.

Well, this is turning into quite an adventure. Nothing serious yet though, fortunately. Shortly after the previous blog post I walked downstairs and said, “Hey, why you sitting in the dark?” Turns out the power went out during the time I was walking down the stairs. Emily was very upset about this because it was dark, but giving her a flashlight to play with solved that problem. Then she was upset that she couldn’t watch TV. I got the laptop out for her to watch a DVD one. The power came back on a few minutes after that.

We had some lunch and then I went back upstairs to get the computers back up and found that there was a puddle on the floor of the computer room again even though I’d plugged up the spray coming from the bottom of the window. The water seemed to be coming from the side wall, so I popped open the side window to see what was happening on the roof.

Oops, the roof was like a swimming pool about 8 inches deep with water. I went outside to try to unplug the drain but had a lot of trouble finding it. After about 10 minutes I had to give up and call in the reinforcements. My mother in law went out and found the drain and cleared it out quickly. By this time I was completely soaked and had to strip off my clothes and take a shower to get cleaned up. Being outside on the roof during a typhoon is not exactly fun.

Water is hitting the northern window in the computer room so hard that it was spraying up out the bottom of the window every time there was a big gust of wind. It was spraying right on top of the computer and had made a small puddle on the floor which the servers were sitting in. Fortunately not enough to damage anything; even the printer looks OK. Stuffed a towel in the bottom of the window which seems to do the trick.

Yes folks, this is it. “Super Typhoon” Krosa is already giving us plenty of wind and rain and this is just the beginning. This afternoon looks like it’ll be an E-Ticket Ride.

It’s been a fairly slow season for Typhoons as far as Taipei is concerned. The last two were fairly unexciting. Next on base is Typhoon Krosa (颱風柯羅莎). It may affect us as soon as tomorrow night with most of the effect coming on Saturday. I may be making a foolish prediction again, but this is a big one with strong winds, good organization and a strong eye. This could be it.

This one kinda snuck up on us but looks like we’ll be socked in with Typhoon Wipha tomorrow for those of us in Northern Taiwan. It actually looks like it might miss us to the north, but as always these things are very difficult to predict. We decided not to open the restaurants tomorrow morning as all of northern Taiwan has called a day off. We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow as the day goes on whether and when to re-open.

Things have pretty much quieted down here. On the way home from checking in at my Qingcheng Restaurant I saw a small tree (really more like a sapling) in front of Nanjing E. Rd. MRT station knocked over, and there were at least two big trees down in Rongxing Park on the Minquan-Jianguo corner, one of which was covering the sidewalk. I also saw a branch down in front of the hospital at the corner of Minquan-Jilin. So looks like we did get some decent gusts earlier this morning even in the city. But it looks like those on the southside of Taipei in Xindian City, Muzha and Yangmei had a lot more excitement than we did, just from being a couple dozen km closer to the storm center.