The aftermath of Typhoon Soulik

We had to cancel VBS because of the Typhoon.  But because John wanted to make sure everything was closed he took a quick scooter ride and found out that indeed the church was closed.  Then when he got home he told us to get ready because we were going to get out and see what had happened the night before.  Plus we went to show the kids the difference between a rain storm and a typhoon.  Here are some pictures from the drive around the Hsinchu area.

 The first place John showed us was a bridge that had a section torn out of it.  That was one of the bridges that we took to get to our friends house, however that bridge had been closed for at least a year from a previous typhoon that had weakened the bridge.  I guess the people who made the decision knew what they were talking about.

 A farm out in the rain and the wind making sure everything was okay in his rice paddy field.   We saw lots of farmers out during while we were driving around trying to get stuff done.  A lot of the farmers had rushed to make sure the harvest the rice before the storm hit...unfortunately not all the rice was harvested.  But I was told that it looked like a lot of the rice was salvageable.

 This area is in between Hsinchu and Jhubei...it's the floodplain and usually there is just a little bit of water that flows down this area.  However you could tell how high the water had been by the remnant of trash left when the waters had receded.

 There were areas in Hsinchu were cars were driving through very LARGE puddles of waters.  We were so thankful that we were okay and everyone we knew what okay with minimum issues. There were other areas around Taiwan that got hit much harder than we did.