Opinion | Is Hong Kong going to let extreme weather rain on productivity?

I apologise if this offends anyone, but I feel obliged to ask if Hong Kong has become a city of wusses. Do we really have to close down much of the city every time there’s excessive rain?

The three-tier system Hong Kong has for rainstorm warnings – comprising amber, red and black – is useful for alerting the community to the likely intensity of rainfall, but I really have to ask if it is still suitable as a guide for whether people should go to work or be expected to do so.

Hong Kong recently experienced its fourth black rainstorm signal in an eight-day timespan, which is a record, and has resulted in a historic amount of rainfall for the month of August. The question is whether that should be sufficient reason to bring much of normal life to a standstill.

The actual experience of recent days suggests we could be a lot more pragmatic in our approach. Take last week, for example. On both Monday and Tuesday, I had to travel from Hong Kong Island to the RTHK studio in Broadcast Drive to take part in a radio show. On Monday, with a red rainstorm alert, the trip was smooth as traffic was fairly light, though there was a bit of a build-up in the opposite direction.

When the show finished at 10pm, there was a cloudburst in Kowloon Tong. However, a taxi soon showed up to drive me to an MTR station nearby. The train service to Admiralty was operating normally.

On Tuesday, there was a black signal and almost no road traffic in either direction. There was another cloudburst at the end of the show, but the minibus and train soon did the trick. On both days, I got a bit wet, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary on a rainy day.

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Opinion | Is Hong Kong going to let extreme weather rain on productivity?

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