Once in 500 Years
Sep 22, 2023
In my last message to the ISF community, I made reference to the inevitability of perilous weather events in the future, noting, “There will always be another ‘black rain’…lurking around the corner”. The message was published on the afternoon of Thursday, 7 September. A number of ISF parents commented on my apparent prescience in predicting the unprecedented storm that was, at the time of publication, approaching Hong Kong, striking late Thursday evening. Alas, I am not a prophet and have no ability to foresee future events, particularly one as striking and dramatic as the torrential downpour that turned parts of Hong Kong into rivers of surging waters.
It has been unsettling to read of criticism directed at the authorities for failing to predict and prepare for what some in government have claimed was a ‘once-in-500-years’ event. If the scale of the deluge was truly on that scale, eclipsing anything on our local record books, then the question of who in authority should have known about the storm and warned local residents seems absurd to me. Who among us can predict events that only occur once in a half-millennium? How could anyone know that one quarter of Hong Kong’s annual rainfall would flood the streets of our city in one single day?
If we take the press-conference claim by government officials that this catastrophe was something we would only see ‘once in 500 years’ literally, we should take a moment to digest this. Five hundred years ago in 1523, the world was a very different place. The Jiajing Emperor ruled China as the 12th Ming Emperor, Henry VIII was King of England, France, and Ireland and Defender of the Faith, theologian Martin Luther had just been excommunicated from the Catholic Church, news of the discovery of a new continent across the Atlantic Ocean was starting to circulate in Europe, and the birth of William Shakespeare was still 41 years in the future. The transformation of the world since that time is nothing short of a chaotic admixture of miracle and disaster. Predicting any part of that journey with any accuracy would have been considered heresy in 1523; today it just seems unreasonable.
The Black Rain event of 7-8 September 2023 did not leave our own small, verdant valley untouched. As already communicated to the ISF community, at around 9:00 a.m. on 8 September, without any prior warning, a landslip struck the slopes on the western side of our school. The affected area, just over 1,635 square meters, 109 meters in length, left a visible ‘scar’ on the once uniformly green slopes adjacent to our school; images of the landslip were shared around the globe almost instantaneously. The landslip deposited just over 900 cubic meters of top soil and vegetation at the base of the slope next to B Block. While the school suffered no damage as a result, the debris did clog the drains, leading to some minor flooding in the basement car park.
Successive evaluations of the landslip, and the stability and safety of the exposed slope by the competent authorities from the Hong Kong Police Force, the Fire Services Department, the Buildings Department (BD), and Geotechnical Engineering Office of the Civil Engineering and Development Department (CEDD) concurred that the slope posed no imminent danger. We are now working closely with experts in slope safety at CEDD to take steps to repair the damaged slope and evaluate the possibility of similar occurrences in the future. It is likely that this work will be carried out over a period of some months, commencing with removal of debris from the slope itself, followed by further stabilization measures to secure the exposed rock face.
Just like our beleaguered officials defending their ‘failure to predict’, we have also reviewed our own preparedness in light of the landslip. Over the 15 years in which The ISF Academy has called Kong Sin Wan ‘home’, management vigilance and data gathering about our location has been thorough and constant. In fact, in 2022, an independent engineering consultant was engaged to survey the slopes around the school to help us manage and protect our immediate environment. There was no prior indication that a landslip was even likely. We had merely taken prudent steps to prepare for the unlikely. We can now adopt measures to factor in the circumstances of our own ‘once-in-500 years’ event, with the safety of our community always of paramount importance.
Dr. Malcolm Pritchard
Head of School
