The death toll from severe flooding in Vietnam has risen to 90, with 12 people still unaccounted for, the environment ministry said on Sunday, as days of relentless rain and landslides continued to batter the south central region.
Heavy downpours that began in late October have inundated major coastal destinations and triggered destructive landslides across highland provinces. Entire neighbourhoods in the resort city of Nha Trang were submerged last week, while the mountain routes around Da Lat saw fatal slopes collapse without warning.
In Dak Lak province, among the hardest hit areas, flooding left tens of thousands of homes under water. Sixty one year old farmer Mach Van Si described how he and his wife survived two nights on their roof after waters rose too quickly for escape. He said the floods swept away their neighbourhood and left everything coated in mud.
More than sixty of the deaths recorded since mid November occurred in Dak Lak alone. Several communes there remained flooded on Sunday, according to the environment ministry. Across five affected provinces more than eighty thousand hectares of crops have been damaged and over three point two million livestock and poultry lost.
Rescue efforts have involved helicopter airdrops to isolated communities as roads and mountain passes remain blocked by debris. Tens of thousands of personnel have been deployed to deliver food, clothing and water purification supplies, state media reported.
Infrastructure has suffered widespread disruption. Two suspension bridges in Khanh Hoa province were destroyed, with national highways and railway lines still closed in several locations. More than one hundred thousand households remain without electricity.
The environment ministry estimates economic losses across five provinces at more than three hundred million dollars. Vietnam has recorded nearly three hundred disaster related deaths or missing persons this year amid increasingly frequent extreme weather events linked to human driven climate change.
