Rain of Biblical Proportions

It has been raining pitchforks over the last week in Hong Kong. In fact, local weathercasters are calling this past weekend's storms the worst on record in the past 124 years. Friday evening thru Saturday morning saw an astounding 410 millimeters of rain fall over a 12 hour period -- that is 15.7 inches! Dad, you'd have to get a larger rain gauge. They raised the Black Rain signal which means rainfall will eclipse 2.75 inches in a single hour. It was crazy -- Streets flooded, drains overflowed, street sinkholes gobbled up cars, cats chased dogs, it was crazy.

Hong Kong is situated at the base of "The Peak" a large mountain that towers over the city. To combat landslides the government has poured concrete over much of the Peak giving it a hard-candied outer shell that protects the earth below it. So rainfall just rolls off it and streams down into the city (see video.) A drastic and unsightly approach, but remarkably effective in times like this.

We were quite happy to endure the storm from our perch in the clouds. That is not an exaggeration, it was as if we were living in a cloud as the view from all our windows was nothing but greyness, punctuated by frequent lightning bursts. The old trick of counting the number of seconds from the flash to the thunder to determine the strike's distance proved that several strikes must have been hitting our building. There was no time to count. It was wild.