After Typhoon Yagi, Vietnam is counting its losses and facing floods. For fifteen hours between Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 September, this whirlwind phenomenon exceeding 150 km/h, raged on Halong Bay, devastated part of the port city of Haiphong, blew away trees and roofs in Hanoi, the capital, before moving north to the mountain resort of Sapa, at an altitude of 1,600 metres, famous for its ethnic minority villages and rice terraces. The typhoon was then downgraded to tropical depression status on Sunday.
At the latest count on Tuesday, September 10, at least 63 people have died and 40 are still missing. The actual death toll from the typhoon was initially relatively low thanks to precautions taken by a population warned in advance, but it has worsened with the consequences of the floods: twenty people died on Monday in a bus that was thrown into a river by a landslide in the mountainous province of Cao Bang, in the north of the country.
At least ten people went missing that same day after a 1995 steel truss bridge over the Red River collapsed in Phu Tho province, north of Hanoi. The wind had stopped blowing, but the force of the current had apparently loosened one of the bridge’s piers. A video taken from a car approaching the bridge shows a dump truck suddenly diving headfirst into the bridge as the bridge deck collapsed nearly 60 meters. The motorcyclist behind it stopped in shock before cautiously walking toward the gaping hole. The alarmingly high water level in the river prompted authorities to restrict heavy vehicle traffic on the Chuong Duong Bridge, one of Hanoi’s most important, from Tuesday.
Tangle of beams
A whole part of the semi-rural hinterland that covers the north of the capital was submerged, sometimes up to the first floors of houses. In Hanoi, the army had to be sent in to clear the roads of roof debris and the destruction caused by the fall of 17,000 trees (the municipality has 1.8 million and the urban center 8,000). Among them, African mahogany trees that add charm to the streets of the old city, but which had been singled out for their propensity to bulge the sidewalks and break in the event of a storm. The municipality had planned to replace them in 2017, but this work had been postponed.
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