A bridge collapsed and a bus was swept away by flooding yesterday as more rain fell on northern Vietnam from a former typhoon that has caused at least 59 deaths in the Southeast Asian nation, state media reported.
Nine people died during the typhoon, which made landfall in Vietnam on Saturday before weakening to a depression, and 50 others died during the consequent floods and landslides.
The water levels of several rivers in northern Vietnam were dangerously high.
Photo: AFP
A passenger bus carrying 20 people was swept into a flooded stream by a landslide in mountainous Cao Bang Province yesterday morning. Rescuers were deployed, but landslides blocked the path to where the incident took place.
In Phu Tho Province, rescue operations were continuing after a steel bridge over the engorged Red River collapsed yesterday morning. Reports said 10 cars and trucks along with two motorbikes fell into the river. Three people were pulled out of the river and taken to the hospital, but 13 others were missing.
Pham Truong Son, 50, told VNExpress that he was driving on the bridge on his motorcycle when he heard a loud noise. Before he knew what was happening, he was falling into the river.
“I felt like I was drowned to the bottom of the river,” Son told the online newspaper, adding that he managed to swim and hold on to a drifting banana tree to stay afloat before he was rescued.
Typhoon Yagi was the strongest typhoon to hit Vietnam in decades when it made landfall on Saturday with winds up to 149kph. It weakened to a tropical depression on Sunday, but the nation’s meteorological agency has still warned the continuing downpours could cause floods and landslides.
A landslide on Sunday killed six people including an infant and injured nine others in Sa Pa, a popular trekking base known for its terraced rice fields and mountains.
Overall, state media reported 21 deaths and at least 299 people injured at the weekend.
Skies were overcast in the capital, Hanoi, with occasional rain yesterday morning as workers cleared the uprooted trees, fallen billboards and toppled electricity poles. Heavy rain continued in northwestern Vietnam and forecasters said it could exceed 40cm in places.
Initially, at least 3 million people were left without electricity in Quang Ninh and Haiphong provinces, and it was unclear how much had been restored.
The two provinces are industrial hubs, housing many factories that export goods, including electric vehicle maker VinFast and Apple suppliers Pegatrong and USI.
Factory workers told The Associated Press on Sunday that many industrial parks were inundated and the roofs of many factories had been blown away.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh visited Haiphong on Sunday and approved a package of US$4.62 million to help the port city recover.
Yagi also damaged agricultural land, nearly 116,192 hectares where rice is mostly grown.
Before hitting Vietnam, Yagi caused at least 20 deaths in the Philippines last week and four deaths in southern China.
Chinese authorities said infrastructure losses across Hainan Province amounted to US$102 million with 57,000 houses collapsed or damaged, power and water outages, and roads damaged or impassable due to fallen trees.
Yagi made a second landfall in Guangdong, a mainland province neighboring Hainan, on Friday night.
Storms such as Typhoon Yagi are “getting stronger due to climate change, primarily because warmer ocean waters provide more energy to fuel the storms, leading to increased wind speeds and heavier rainfall,” Earth Observatory of Singapore director Benjamin Horton said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS