Hanoi Floods
Trip Start
Jan 04, 2008
1
13
Trip End
Ongoing
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Sunday, November 2, 2008
At school, many of the Vietnamese staff have had water through their houses and had to go home early on Friday to sort things out. It has rained fairly constantly from early Friday morning and is still going now, late on Sunday afternoon. The river has risen, but as yet is not posing problem around the city.
All the workers in the huts below us have had to vacate their accommodation and are not living in the uncompleted shell of a 20 story building they are working on. All Saturday morning they were carrying out bedding, cloths, TV's, motor bikes, cooking gear, etc, as the huts went under about 50 cm of water front he creek beside them.
The Vietnamese never let an opportunity go by and now you see all the men wading through the flooded fields laying out fine fishing nets, or working the water with two bamboo poles fitted with electrodes which put a current through the water and stun any fish between to poles
Entrance into Ciputra
. One guy below us managed to stun a small snake and quickly flipped into his basket.HANOI: Floods and heavy rain have left at least 22 people dead in the last two days in central and northern Vietnam, with the capital Hanoi hardest hit, officials said Sunday.
The dead, among them four children, drowned or were killed by falling trees, houses collapsing, being electrocuted or struck by lightning, said Hoang Quang Dung from the National Flood and Storm Prevention Committee.
"Rains have hit northern and central Vietnam from Phu Tho to Ha Tinh provinces", he said. "They could continue until Wednesday."
Vietnamese authorities also said around 55,000 houses and 180,000 hectares of crops had been flooded and estimated material losses at tens of millions of dollars.
In Hanoi alone, hit Friday and Saturday by the heaviest rain since 1984, nine people died.
The extreme weather caused traffic chaos in the capital Friday, leaving many people stranded.
"Several houses and neighbourhood are still flooded Sunday," Dung told AFP, saying the authorities were taking all necessary measures to tackle what he described as exceptional flooding, especially for the time of year.
