Hong Kong was drenched on Friday by the heaviest rain since records began 140 years ago, killing one person and injuring 83, media reports said.
Videos showed cascades of water surging down steep hillsides in the former British colony, flooding waist-deep in narrow streets, and inundating malls, metro stations and tunnels, Reuters reported.
The extreme weather also brought chaos to the nearby Chinese city of Shenzhen, a tech hub of more than 17.7 million people, with business and transport links across the economically important Pearl River Delta severely hit.
“I’ve never seen scenes like this before. Even during previous typhoons, it was never this severe. It’s quite terrifying,” said Hong Kong assistant nurse Connie Cheung, 65.
The torrential rain was brought by Haikui, a typhoon that made landfall in the Chinese province of Fujian on Tuesday. Although it weakened to a tropical depression its slow-moving clouds have dumped huge volumes of precipitation on areas still soaked by rain from a super typhoon a week earlier.
Hong Kong authorities shut schools on Friday and told workers to stay at home. The city’s stock exchange was also shuttered.
Eric Chan, secretary for administration, said the city’s transport network was “severely disrupted” and an “extreme conditions situation” would be extended to midnight on Friday.
MTR Corp (0066.HK), which operates the city’s rail network, said at least one line was shut while others were operating with delays. One video clip showed metro workers wading waist-deep in a station.
Some roads were partly washed, including a main route to the city’s southern beaches. A car was swallowed up by a metres wide pothole when one section of road collapsed, social media pictures showed.
Rescue workers took one person to hospital who was dead on arrival, a television news channel reported.
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