The ancient Vietnamese city of Hue, a World Heritage site popular with tourists, is under water after heavy rain flooded thousands of homes and blocked highways.
Images from state media showed residents navigating flooded streets in boats, while houses and cars were partially submerged.
“The city is flooded everywhere, and the water is rising very fast since Tuesday night,” Hue resident Vu An told AFP, adding that the city’s electricity had been cut.
Heavy rain has affected several provinces along the coast since Monday.
More than 2,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the central province of Quang Tri, where three people are missing, authorities said.
Some parts of the national highway connecting northern and southern Vietnam are also blocked due to landslides caused by floods.
Vietnam is often hit by severe weather in the rainy season between June and November.
Experts say the severe impacts of the monsoon season have become the new norm as rapid urbanization, upstream dams, and poor drainage systems exacerbate the country’s vulnerability to climate change.
Areas from the northern to the southern parts of the country have struggled to cope with heavy rains through October, but a cluster of locales have been hit the hardest, including the central coastal city of Da Nang, and the adjoining Quang Nam and Thua Thien-Hue provinces. In mid-October, officials put the natural disaster risk at its highest level in the three locations.
Nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from Da Nang, Vietnam’s third-largest city on October 14. That day, flood waters reached as high as 1.5 meters in some areas of the city. Da Nang education officials closed schools October 16 because of flood threats, keeping 276,000 children home.
The stormy weather also has led to fatalities. Nine people died amid floods and landslides in September, according to the National Steering Center for Natural Disaster Prevention. In October, a 61-year-old and a 13-year-old in coastal locales were found dead after being caught in floods, and four South Korean tourists died after their car was swept away in a flood in the Central Highlands city of Dalat.
Vietnam is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, with a 3,200-kilometer coastline and much of its population of 100 million in low-lying cities and river deltas, VOA reports.
Photo: VNEXpress
