Typhoon Nesat & Haitang

The typhoon came! It was a binary storm so there were actually two typhoons. Typhoon Nesat arrived on Saturday and Haitang came up from the South and greeted us today.

Satellite imagery of the storms courtesy of NASA

Saturday morning I woke up to the world being drenched in rain. The troughs right outside our door were completely filled and water was quickly rising. Luckily to pace of the rainfall let up, otherwise I can see how flooding could become a reality swiftly in that kind of rain. In the mid afternoon the storm became a light trickle so I decided to venture out to see how the world was faring. Surprisingly it was doing better than it was the night before. Friday night was filled with panic and people buying every last scrap of food they could find. Saturday there were some people milling about, less than usual but still people, about a dozen food stands on food street were open, and the shelves in the store were in the process of being restocked. It was as though surviving the night had restored order to the minds of everyone in the area.

Some pictures I snapped during my walk.

A cute little moped family complete with kid bike hiding from the storm under their battered tarp.

Saturday night around 11:00 P.M. is when the storm really got interesting. The wind picked up and I've decided that the wind is what makes a typhoon scary. The doors and all of the windows connected to the outside of the apartment began shaking/banging in their sockets. It was reminiscent of a haunted house or Halloween themed roller coaster where the are windows banging inexplicably just to scare you, except there was a very real and understandable reason for the noise this time.

Overall the storm wasn't as frightful as it could've been, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I am aware that this was our first typhoon and it was only a "medium" sized one (according to the locals). 

My Mom read me this article during our last Skype session that talked about how this year Taiwan is going to experience more typhoons than is normal in a typical typhoon season. It's not due to global warming or anything unusual, it's just due to the weather patterns this year; so there will be plenty of typhoons in our future.

Typhoon Nesat hitting Taiwan and Typhoon Haitang in the South. The black dot on the island is roughly Changhua's location. Changhua is slightly closer to the coast than that dot but my fingers aren't precise enough to make it exact.