From China to Europe, being ill prepared for floods will leave us soaked in regret
As residents of South Lantau will tell you, living in the pretty seaside town of Mui Wo at the bottom of one of Hong Kong's larger mountains can occasionally get a bit damp.
Being on the flood plain of several small rivers that flow into Silvermine Bay, residents have at times found themselves waist-deep in water for a few days during the summer storms, ruining furniture and playing havoc with their septic tanks.
Several large flood ditches were constructed around the villages at the base of the mountain, and according to hardy residents with memories that go back 15 years to the Asian floods that prompted the build, this "solved" the problem.
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Indeed, the ditches are useful, when it is dry the water buffalo and the cows find them a good supply of grass, the displaced frogs and toads have found their way back to the swampy dampness, and occasionally they have been a saviour for a lost paraglider to come in to land. But when it rains hard, they do their intended job and take the flood out of the swamp and into the river Silver.
However, even in the relatively short time I have lived there, the storms seem to have got progressively worse, and more frequent. The storm ditches get filled quicker these days and soon meet the storm surge from the sea, which with typhoon Mangkhut in 2018 submerged the Mui Wo ferry pier for a day and almost washed away our pub. Watching the fisherman's polystyrene flotsam coming towards my flat during the No 10 beast when it usually floats out the other way towards the sea got me worried.
In the 10 years I have been there, many more new buildings have been erected on and around the swamp at the back of the town, families have moved in, and the whole area has got much busier.
In the longer term, we know that the government still plans to reclaim and build on the whole area, and those tens of thousands of new residents where the buffalo used to roam will put demands on infrastructure; critically, essential fresh water supplies and sewage.
As any school kid can tell you, water starts in the sky, falls on the hills, works its way through rivers and reservoirs, is stored, filtered, and piped to our taps, clean and refreshing.
We use it once and chuck it down the drain, where it flows into the sea, sometimes via a sewage plant, where it evaporates before this gentle, balanced cycle restarts. Everything is fine until the cycle is interrupted by a large storm where a huge dump of rain messes up the science of fluid dynamics and we end up floating to the pub along with the snakes and village effluent.
This past July, China's Henan province took a huge hit from a storm, with the rainwater demonstrating how drainage infrastructure that was once considered adequate in a big and modern city failed. A year's rain fell in just three days, and we saw shocking images of flooded cities and commuters stuck on partly submerged subway trains. By August, the toll of the Henan flood reached 302 deaths, 50 missing and 9.3 million affected.
Germany and Belgium too got hit this past summer, at about the same time, with horrendous flooding that also soaked other parts of Europe. A wide area of the Rhine region experienced record-breaking rainfall where twice the normal rain for the whole month of July fell in just 48 hours. Infrastructure was similarly inadequate to cope with such a downpour, mobile networks failed, houses were washed away, bridges collapsed, and as of July 20, 10 days after the rain started, 196 people had died.
Given the mess created by this amount of water being dumped in one place, one must wonder why anyone did not accurately foresee it.
Modern flood modelling computers did see it, according to Professor Hannah Cloke of Britain's Reading University. They nailed predictions of the floods in Germany and the warnings were released in bulletins from the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS). This is part of the global Copernicus Emergency Management Unit, which monitors floods that occur daily across the globe.
If that is true, and the warnings were issued, then where did it all go wrong? And why did so many people die?
Perhaps the answers lie in the expression "I don't remember it ever being as bad as this!"
We have short memories when it comes to many bad things, and more fundamentally, we would in any case not remember the 35-day Great Flood of Paris in 1910, would we? Or Central China in 1931 where an area the size of Britain was underwater and up to 4 million died. And few might remember 1953 when North Sea storm surges flooded massive areas of the Netherlands and East Anglia in Britain.
Predictions, which are based on probabilities, also attract outrage from a misunderstanding public which accuses forecasters of "crying wolf". I am guilty of this too, at times, when the Hong Kong Observatory calls a No. 8 storm signal while the trees barely sway outside and I need to get to the office. Unfortunately, the Germans and the Belgians chose to ignore the warnings, and what was about to happen to them had not been seen in living memory.
Alarm bulletins covering the river Rhine catchment area in Germany and Switzerland were issued on July 10 warning of a "high probability of floods" and the potential for Belgium too to be affected, three days before it happened. In the few days that followed, further alarms raised the likelihood that the floods were going to be very serious.
The inaction of relevant authorities after the flood alerts will certainly force a rethink about the handling of such warnings in future. And flood-prone countries in Asia, including China after this year's disasters, would be well advised to sit up and take notice. Most modern cities are terribly unprepared, and when the warnings came no one really knew what to do.
What can we do and how can we prepare for such eventualities? I suggest three ways:
1. Stop building in flood-prone areas and move people out. In Hong Kong this would be lowlands, and reclaimed parts of the territory which are planned to be expanded in the form of the Lantau Tomorrow Vision. The government could save face if the whole ordeal was cancelled for safety reasons. Around the region, this would also include homes in large parts of India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Australia, just to name a few which were all flooded in 2021. However, that solution seems pretty unlikely.
2. Catch the water before it gets to the flood plains. This involves catching and storing it in buffers in the hills, which basically mean dams and reservoirs. This can be politically sensitive. In Asia, for example, almost all of the major rivers originate in China, specifically off the Tibetan Plateau. Building dams and controlling water flow to neighbouring countries is a fast way to raise tensions in an area where they are already worryingly bad. For example, between India and China, and downstream between India and Bangladesh, and of course China and Vietnam, where 90 per cent of the country is at risk to coastal flooding. That solution would be very unpopular.
3. Improve water management, infrastructure, early warning systems and general preparation. I believe there will be an emerging business focusing on localised flood prevention services to homeowners and trades. And the work will not just be limited to government entities, so there will be money to be made. There are already highly-focused weather prediction businesses, one of which is listed in Japan and sells localised rainfall forecasts four hours in advance.
The distribution of water is currently changing globally, and the intensity of storms is increasing. You can blame anything you like, natural or man-made causes, we will have to deal with the impact of climate change no matter the cause. Advanced and accurate flood warning technology will help in the longer term, but we may find that the way we prepare for such disasters, or even choose where to live, changes in the very near term.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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