Dozens of people are dead or missing after a “super typhoon” made landfall in northern Vietnam, triggering landslides and widespread flooding, the country said.
By Leo Sands
In a telephone interview Monday, Thanh Vu, the Vietnam representative for the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council, said Typhoon Yagi was unusually powerful.
“This is the worst typhoon in probably three decades in Vietnam. For the northern part of Vietnam, we’ve never seen this,” he said.
Northern Vietnam is less accustomed to weathering powerful storms, he noted.
“The hardest-hit provinces are the key economic hubs in the north: the port city of Haiphong and the neighboring province of Quang Ninh, which is home to the World Heritage [site] Ha Long Bay,” Vu added.
Vu said the port, which continues to operate despite high winds and is the largest in northern Vietnam, is a crucial node in the country’s burgeoning electronics manufacturing sector — particularly for the export of mobile phones and laptops.
At least nine people were swept away when the Phong Chau bridge in Phu Tho province collapsed on Monday morning as a result of the flooding, local media reported, with five cars and four motorbikes missing. Authorities said they rescued three people who survived the collapse by clinging to the bridge’s railings, state media reported.
The steel bridge, which was built in 1995, fell into the water about 10 a.m., according to video footage shared by state media. A large truck can be seen suddenly plunging as a length of the crossing gives way, with a motorcyclist just behind the vehicle braking suddenly.
The typhoon also cut power to thousands of homes and uprooted trees that are obstructing roads and will probably take days to clear, Vu said.
In the city of Thai Nguyen in northern Vietnam, state media reported that about 3,000 households were flooded as of Monday morning, with hundreds of people evacuated. The government said dozens of boats sank in the province of Quang Ninh. Nationwide, 148,000 hectares of rice were flooded, and more than 1,000 livestock and 678,000 poultry died, it added.
On Monday, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh directed government agencies to focus their resources on responding to the bridge collapse, as well as on providing aid to the victims of floods and landslides in the country’s north. According to government forecasts, northern Vietnam is expected to experience heavy rainfall through Tuesday, exposing it to “a very high risk of major floods, landslides, flash floods and localized flooding in low-lying areas.”
As it struck Vietnam, Typhoon Yagi had wind speeds of about 125 mph, with gusts up to 155 mph, according to the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii — equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane.
Before striking Vietnam, Yagi hit the southern Chinese island province of Hainan on Friday afternoon. Officials in the region said the storm was perhaps the strongest to hit the area in a decade. Four people died and 95 others were injured in Hainan, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday.
In the Philippines, authorities reported that the storm killed at least 20 people and injured 22 others. Twenty-six other people were reported missing.
Bryan Pietsch and Sammy Westfall contributed to this report.
