Typhoon Kalmaegi churned across Vietnam yesterday, killing five more people after its devastating passage through the Philippines where the death toll rose to 188.
Kalmaegi unleashed record rainfall and flooding in the central Philippines this week — sweeping away cars, trucks and shipping containers before lashing Vietnam.
“The roof of my house was just blown away,” said Nguyen Van Tam, a 42-year-old fisherman in Vietnam’s Gia Lai Province where the storm made landfall late on Thursday.
Photo: AFP
“We were all safe, [but] the typhoon was really terrible, so many trees fallen,” he said, adding that his boat had survived intact.
Vietnamese authorities were still assessing the damage yesterday, but the environment ministry reported five dead, and 57 houses collapsed in Gia Lai and neighboring Dak Lak.
Nearly 3,000 more had their roofs blown off or were damaged, it said, while 11 boats or ships sank.
Vo Thi Danh, 43, watched from higher ground as Kalmaegi ripped through Nhon Hai fishing village in Gia Lai, splitting boats into kindling and sweeping away the small seaside house where she lived with her family.
“The waves were so high, swallowing the whole house,” she said in tears as she surveyed the rubble. “The house totally collapsed, nothing left.”
It was one of seven homes clustered together in the fishing village that were reduced to chunks of concrete and twisted metal.
In the streets along Gia Lai’s Quy Nhon beach, journalists saw rescue workers and soldiers working with residents to clear uprooted trees, remove debris and collect sheet-metal roofs blown away in the night.
The state power company said 1.6 million clients lost electricity as the typhoon smashed the central coast, but service to one-third had been restored by yesterday morning.
The storm was next forecast to hit Thailand, which yesterday issued a warning for heavy rain and flooding starting in the northeast and spreading to the rest of the country.
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