Typhoon petering out

This time we got off relatively easily. Our neighborhood didn’t get flooded, and the storm had mostly petered out by noon. It was calm enough that I went out to get snacks in the afternoon and there was just a bit of a drizzle. There was a lot of leaves and small branches and assorted garbage littering the street, and there were some motor scooters and bikes that got knocked over, but nothing seriously wrong in our immediate vicinity. The eye of the storm is just leaving the east coast, so while we may get some heavy rain yet from the tail of the storm passing through, but we’re probably over the worst of it.

Other parts of Taiwan are not so lucky. There was lots of flooding, rivers overrunning their banks, bridges washed out, signs knocked over, cars bashed in, etc. Fortunately there is nobody reported dead though, so that’s good news. Three things from TV stuck out about the storm:

When we go to Hualien on the east coast, we stay at the Parkview Hotel there. It’s close to the airport and fairly nice and modern. One of the nice features was the ground floor restaurant where we ate breakfast each morning. It was off the lobby in a large 3 story high atrium with huge glass windows surrounding the dining/buffet area. This is kind of a small picture, but it’ll give you an idea of what it looked like:

I use the past tense because the typhoon blew out all the windows in the atrium and completely destroyed the dining/buffet area. Hualien is more or less at the center of where the Typhoon made landfall.

A temporary construction trailer next to a parking lot was ripped from it’s foundation and hurtled 50 meters through the air to the other side of the parking lot, badly damaging three cars and crushing two others.

And on the lighter side, there was a hilarious video of some farmers rescuing some bulls from flooding. They used a rope to pull the first bull up out of the water and as soon as he gets out he runs straight at the camera, just missing the camera operator, and as the camera swings around the bull is running into the street which is covered by quite a bit of water and then fwoop, he loses his footing and lands on his ass.

In somewhat related news, burglars took advantage of the typhoon to rip off a Gucci store on here in Taipei, taking off with a large stash of high end purses, shoes, etc.