In the evening last night the various houses and businesses made their final preparation for the landfall of Typhoon Noru. The police went around in the evening and enforced an 8pm curfew, which I thought was kind of overkill because at that point it was only raining and we didn't start to see any real winds until the middle of the night nearly 10 hours later. Then at 130AM the power was switched off for the entire area for reasons that I don't know and can only presume that it is to prevent fires. My building has a generator so it didn't affect me a great deal beyond the 4 seconds or so it takes for that to kick in. We still have internet and from what I can tell this is because all of that network have their own battery and generator power backups.
The wind is still blowing really hard right now but I don't think it is on the level that we were told it was going to.
I went on a tiny walk just around my neighborhood and I don't know if this is allowed or not but nobody told me to stop so I took a few photos of the damage that has been done so far and it is quite minimal.
This is just a few blocks from the beach and is protected on the East by a row of tall buildings anyway. I think we can say that this is very minor damage and the owners of those cars are lucky. There is no underground parking for cars in this part of town so I guess they did the best they could.
I did find a seafood restaurant that is within sight of the beach whose roof had been destroyed but before anyone gets worried about this know that almost all of these type of restaurants are intentionally poorly built because the owners of the restaurant do not own the land. Therefore they are not going to spend the money required to make a strong and wind-resistant structure that is just going to be taken away from them after their lease expires in two years.
If you walk down the beach in Da Nang there is always at least a couple of places like this that are simply walked away from once they are destroyed. Most of the time they don't even bother to repair or remove them because after typhoon season we begin rainy season which means there aren't going to be many potential customers anyway. There just isn't any reason to repair it, just like there wasn't any real reason to invest a bunch of money in it either.
I did find one tree that had been felled but I know for a fact that this particular tree was transplanted and was not natural to the area. You can tell by the root structure that this tree had been put there in the past year and didn't have enough time to properly take hold. I would imagine that they will bring a crane by in the next few days and simply prop it back up so it can be knocked down in next year's typhoon as well.
At the moment the typhoon is moving north west and the grunt of it is already behind us and the storm in general is losing steam. Unless there is severe damage somewhere else I would say from my perspective anyway, that this "super typhoon" wasn't very super at all. I slept through most of it.