That's kind of odd. All I've heard via the media for the last week was the risk of catastrophic flooding, including that cool simulation you posted earlier of 3 ft, 6 ft, 9 ft of water in a neighborhood. That thinking is what triggered most of the evacuation orders. Do we have to run down the media everywhere? LOL. Let's leave that in the Spoiler GARM forum.
This is what I've been saying. We're seeing a change in hurricanes where previous focus was on wind speeds (the Saffir - Simpson scale we use to classify storms is only based on wind speeds) but most of the damage we're seeing from storms is coming from water. When predicting who deadly a storm might be the focus should be on things like storm surge and how much water the rain bands might drop. We really need to look at these not just like we do tornadoes but really flash flooding events.
I've been following this since my dad lives in Hong Kong. This storm is stronger than Florence and has killed many more people in the Philippines. It's weakened before it hit Hong Kong and also Hong Kong is very well prepared for typhoons but parts of Southern China are not. There is also flooding in Macau. You can see at the end of the video a crane turning from the wind. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/16/asia/typhoon-mangkhut-china-hong-kong-intl/index.html