Residents of the coastal city of Nha Trang in Vietnam’s Khanh Hoa province, 200 miles northest of Ho Chi Minh City, are brought to safety on Thursday amid severe rain and flooding that killed at least 41 people across coastal and central regions. Photo by Stringer/EPA
At least 41 people have been killed in Vietnam since last weekend after heavy rains and flooding left large areas of central regions of the country underwater. Nine people remain unaccounted for.
More than 52,000 homes were inundated, 500,000 households were without power and tens of thousands were evacuated after 5 feet of rain fell in three days.
In some areas, the flood level was more than 17 feet, the highest recorded in more than three decades.
The worst affected areas were the coastal cities of Hoi An and Nha Trang and the central highlands — a key center of the country’s coffee growing industry — including Dak Lak where a state of emergency was declared after landslides damaged roads and highways.
The Vietnamese National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting was warning as much as another 8 inches of rain over the weekend was expected to fall on areas that are already flooded, including Dak Lak, Gia Lai, Lam Dong, and Khanh Hoa.
The rainfall was expected to push up river already very high water levels in major rivers.
The severe rainfall and flooding come as the country is reeling from a run of extreme weather events that the government estimates have cost the economy $2 billion in the first 10 months of the year, including back-to-back typhoons in the last week of September and first week of October.
Typhoon Bualoi and Typhoon Matmo were the third and fifth costliest storms to ever hit Vietnam, causing widespread damage to infrastructure, homes and food production, killing 73 people and injuring more than 180.
Two weeks ago, Typhoon Kalmaegi killed at least six people after crossing the coast in Dak Lak on Nov. 6, packing winds of 90 mph, uprooting trees, ripping roofs off roofs and shattering windows. Tens of thousands of residents reported their houses destroyed or flooded.
Kalmaegi arrived from the Philippines, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction across the central islands of the country, where it killed at least 269 people and injured more than 500, mostly in Cebu.
