By the way . . .

Hurricane Kompasu

September 2, 2010

(Image from Korea Herald)

A hurricane hit Korea yesterday during the early hours of the morning. I thought that I ought to note that fact lest any reader imagine that I missed the storm as it passed over Seoul. I didn't miss it, though it had weakened from a typhoon to a tropical storm upon striking land, and it didn't miss me, as you can see from this comment that I posted over at Robert Koehler's blog:

I witnessed it. I get up regularly at 3 a.m. to blog, so I noticed the rushing wind and closed the window to just a crack, but as the gusts blasted harder, I had to shut even that, but I could hear things rolling around outside, and noise of other things scraping across the parking lot -- plastic, or metal, I reckoned. Around 3:30 or so, calm descended, and I wondered if the very eye of the storm was passing. Apparently so. The wind later picked up again. I even got blasted around 6:30 as I was heading to Mangu Station, an 8-minute walk from my apartment, but managed somehow to protect both myself and my umbrella. I discovered the trains weren't running there at Mangu, so I rushed to catch a taxi as gusts now blew my cap off. I caught it and the taxi and headed for Ewha. Along the way, I saw a lot of minor destruction and even one large tree felled halfway across the three lanes opposite, forcing the oncoming traffic to share our side of the street. I began to wonder if going to work this morning was a good idea, but I made it and learned from a colleague that the brunt of the storm had passed on to the North Country. It's their problem now . . .

Except for the large tree down, most of what I glimpsed from the taxi window was minor and superficial, not major, structural damage, but the news yesterday evening showed a lot of major destruction in other places.

I guess that we were lucky . . . some of us.