Rear Window | Macau after Typhoon Mangkhut

Severo Portela

These days we find ourselves turning to recollect a former Portuguese prime-minister who was credited with having said – although he was not exactly a follower of the school of sound-bites – that there is no such thing as luck in politics. Indeed, it was not luck which took him to the top international job as the UN Secretary-General. Luck comes always after careful preparation.

The same thought comes to mind after Super-Typhoon Mangkhut hit Macau hard. Differently, totally differently from last year’s Hato tragedy, the announced catastrophe was met with the preparedness of the civil protection apparatus and its preventive measures and a comprehensive pre-disaster set of preparation tools that helped avoid casualties and mitigated material consequences to the city’s infrastructure. That is to say, there was no luck blessing MSAR because the government and its more closely related departments and with the full cooperation of utilities and businesses like the six-pack casino-resorts, community organizations and civil society took all measures to face the consequences of a mighty typhoon.

Just a few dozen light casualties, a few thousand residents displaced temporarily, and a few minor electricity and water supply issues. There were 90 power units to be repaired this year compared with more than 200 following Hato.

Chief Executive Chui Sai On and the government Secretaries directly involved in the Mangkhut reception may, with all due credit, claim the complex operation to have been a success…although they are assessing their own performance. But on side of the results, the average resident would agree that in this year of 2018, MSAR faced a super-typhoon as a multi-issue threat, not merely a problem of the forecasting department.

However, and perhaps because it is too early for it to be disclosed, there are some aspects still not available for public scrutiny.

First of all, the financial burden the Macau Special Administrative Region or its Civil Protection combined operations had to bear so as to respond at this level of success to Mangkhut, but also the upgrades to the utilities the concessionaires felt obliged to make to cooperate with disaster prevention preparations and the necessary follow-up, and the overall evaluation of the SAR infrastructure.

Civil society has also the right to know if the government is considering, or is about to reject, the longer-term solutions to the inevitable typhoon-induced flooding of the low-lying areas of the Inner Harbor and Ilha Verde such as a fixed water-pumping system and the construction of a wall or a tidal gate barrier. If not…Secretary for Transport and Public Works, Raimundo Rosario seems to accept that flooding of the Inner Harbor is unavoidable in the short term.

Finally, we do have to mention the matter of the spreading of rumors as a part of Civil Protection operation to deal with Typhoon Mangkhut. The Judiciary Police seems to have gathered enough evidence to make a case of the spreading rumors during calamities, and four other situations of the same kind are still under investigation. According to director Sit Chong Meng, the suspect took information from an official government source and modified it before sharing it on social media.

If convicted under the provisions of the Macau Penal Code, the author faces a maximum sentence of six months. If the civil protection law to protect residents from false social alarm is to be green-lighted at the Legislative Assembly the same rumor-monger could face a jail term of three years.