Maltese Families Count Cost as Typhoon Ragasa Slams Hong Kong: Flights Halted, Tuna Trade Hit

Valletta wakes to shuttered classrooms and grounded holiday jets as Typhoon Ragasa tears through Hong Kong, severing the umbilical air corridor that links Malta’s winter sun-seekers to the fragrant dai pai dong markets of Kowloon. At 06:15 CET, Air Malta flight KM856—popular with Maltese students heading to Chinese-language summer programmes—was officially scratched from today’s departures board, the first of at least four south-bound services cancelled as Cathay Pacific and HK Express batten down the hatches 9,300 km away.

For the 387 Maltese citizens currently registered with the embassy in Beijing, the storm is more than a distant weather bulletin. “My daughter Jade’s IB school in Pok Fu Lam sent a push alert at 3 a.m. our time,” recounts Cospicua mother Claudine Falzon, who has been pacing the tiled floor of her 17th-century townhouse while WhatsApp voice notes ping across the continent. “She was supposed to fly home Friday for the village festa. Now we’re looking at an empty chair at the band-club dinner table.”

The Malta International Airport (MIA) customer-care desk has fielded 212 rebooking queries since midnight, most involving passengers connecting through Dubai or Doha onto Hong Kong. Deputy CEO Ivan Borg told Hot Malta that the airport is waiving date-change fees for tickets issued in Malta until 20 July, a small mercy for families already hit by €1,200-a-head peak-season fares. “We’ve opened the SkyParks lounge to stranded travellers needing power sockets and pastizzi at 4 a.m.,” Borg added, noting that the airport chapel has also extended its hours “for those who find peace in candle-light vigil rather than CNN loops of swaying bamboo scaffolding.”

Ragasa, named after a Tagalog word for “gush”, intensified quicker than any July typhoon since 1970, clocking 215 km/h gusts that rival the worst gregale ever recorded in Gozo. Hong Kong’s Observatory hoisted the Signal No. 8 warning—equivalent to a Maltese red gale alert—shutting banks, halting trams and sending domestic workers, many of them Filipino carers with relatives in Malta, into reinforced stairwells. Among them is 31-year-old May Ann Sultado from Santa Venera, who spent the morning taping X’s across her employer’s 34th-floor windows in Mid-Levels. “I survived the 2020 Beirut blast while working there,” she told us by voice message. “Every crack in the glass sounds like fireworks in Birgu. Your body remembers.”

Back home, the ripple effect is cultural as well as logistical. Tonight’s scheduled screening of “Infernal Affairs” at Valletta’s open-air cinema has been postponed because the 35 mm print is stuck at Chek Lap Kok cargo terminal; organisers fear the humid typhoon air could warp the reels. Meanwhile, the Malta-China Friendship Society has cancelled its weekly Mandarin calligraphy class in Floriana, depriving 20 retirees of their cherished ink-and-rice-paper ritual. “For us, Hong Kong is not just a hub—it’s where east literally met west on our ancient trade maps,” laments society president Marica Camilleri, unfurling a 1784 parchment that labels the harbour “Portus Incendi” because early Maltese merchants mistook shoreline joss-stick smoke for sacrificial fires.

Economists are already tallying indirect losses. Malta’s tuna-ranch exporters ship roughly €9 million worth of live fish to Hong Kong restaurants each summer; Ragasa’s port closure forces freezer vessels to idle, burning 3,000 litres of marine diesel daily. “Every 24-hour delay risks a €250,000 price drop when the typhoon passes and Japanese buyers flood the market,” warns Alfred Pisani, CEO of Mediterranean Aquaculture Ltd. His anxiety is shared by local gaming studios; Hong Kong investors in Malta’s iGaming sector were due to land next week for due-diligence tours of new Sliema offices. “Face-to-face trust is huge in Chinese business culture,” notes lawyer-turned-consultant Stephanie Xuereb. “Zoom just doesn’t cut it when you’re negotiating a €50 million server-park licence.”

Yet in true Maltese fashion, adversity is breeding solidarity. By 10 a.m., the Facebook group “Maltese in China & HK” had created a Typhoon Ragasa roll-call thread; within two hours 78 members marked themselves “safe” and offered spare mattresses. Rabat priest Fr. Jimmy Xerri has organised a live-streamed rosary at 18:00 CET “for tempest-tossed compatriots and the Cantonese families who hosted them”. Even the University of Malta’s Confucius Institute is pivoting: today’s cancelled calligraphy workshop will be replaced by a typhoon-themed poetry slam on Instagram Live, featuring bilingual renditions of Du Fu’s eighth-century verses about wind-tossed mulberry trees—lines that could just as easily describe a gale pounding Dingli cliffs.

As Ragasa edges closer, Malta’s Meteorological Office confirms the cyclone will weaken before exiting the Pearl River Delta, but swells of up to 11 metres could still topple containers bound for trans-shipment to Marsaxlokk Freeport. For now, Maltese eyes remain glued to smartphone radar loops, grandparents muttering the old fishermen’s warning: “When the sea gives, the sea takes away.” Whether your child is hunkered in a Hong Kong high-rise or you’re simply a festa-loving local praying that next week’s inbound dim-sum supplies arrive on time, Typhoon Ragasa is a reminder that our island story has never really been insular; it is written on every passport stamp, every delayed suitcase, every anxious mother’s vigil.

When the storm passes, Jade Falzon will eventually board a rebooked flight. She plans to carry home a neon-red umbrellas snapped inside-out by Ragasa’s first gusts—proof, she says, that even a typhoon cannot sever the invisible thread between a Cospicua balcony and a Hong Kong skyline flickering back to life.