Macau said Thursday that eight people were killed in the former Portuguese colony, including two men found overnight in a submerged parking garage. Another 153 were injured amid extensive flooding, power outages, and the smashing of doors and windows by high winds and driving rain.
Residents waded in waist-high murky water and rows of city buses sat half-submerged on city streets, according to photos circulating among residents. Fallen trees blocked roads, causing traffic snarls, and residents lined up with buckets to collect water from public standpipes, television video showed.
Macau, which is surrounded by water, is vulnerable to high tides and has few options for draining storm runoff. The territory took almost a direct hit from the storm as it churned toward mainland China. Its reliance on the mainland for electricity compounded problems. Power cuts in neighboring Guangdong province, which supplies nearly 90 percent of Macau's electricity, cascaded into outages across the city, forcing casino operators, a hospital, and the city's mobile phone company, CTM, to switch to backup generators.
Xinhua said almost 27,000 people were evacuated to emergency shelters, while extensive damage to farmland due to the heavy rain and high tides was also reported. Almost 2 million households lost power temporarily, while fishing boats were called back to port and train services and flights suspended, Xinhua said. "Compared to other typhoons, Hato moved fast, quickly grew more powerful and caused massive amounts of rainfall," Wu Zhifang, chief weather forecaster at the Guangdong meteorological bureau, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
By Thursday, a weaker Hato was moving into China's Guangxi region. Flooding and injuries were also reported in Hong Kong, which lies across the water 64 kilometers (40 miles) from Macau, but there were no reports of deaths. Hato's fierce gales blew out windows on skyscrapers in the Asian financial capital, raining shattered glass onto the eerily quiet streets below. Hong Kong's weather authorities had raised the hurricane signal to the highest level for the first time in five years.
