Typhoon Mirinae brought strong wind to Vietnam’s central coast and heavy rain to the nearby coffee region yesterday, disrupting early harvesting, after killing 16 people and destroying thousands of houses in the Philippines.
The typhoon uprooted trees as it made landfall on the coastal provinces of Binh Dinh and Phu Yen, state-run Vietnam Television reported. The government said nearly 8,000 people had been evacuated in the central region before the typhoon arrived.
Rain fell in Daklak and Lam Dong yesterday morning, Vietnam’s largest coffee-growing provinces, disrupting farmers’ drying of beans, residents said. The harvesting peaks from late this month.
“Strong wind and heavy rain struck us two hours ago,” said a resident in Dalat city.
A resident in neighboring Daklak said rain had been falling there since early yesterday.
Persistent rain would prevent farmers from drying their beans outdoors in the sun, a coffee trader said.
“The fear is that if rain lasts for several days, growers will have to dry beans over their wood-fired ovens, and that will make the beans dark,” the trader said.
Dark beans are counted as a defect in exportable beans. Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee producer after Brazil.
The national weather bureau forecast rain in the next 24 hours in the southern part of the Central Highlands coffee belt as the typhoon weakens to a tropical low pressure system and moves toward Cambodia.
In the Philippines, security forces and emergency teams worked to clear roads of fallen trees, boulders and mud yesterday after Mirinae left the country.
Wide areas south of Manila were still without electricity and most roads were either buried by landslides or submerged by floods, said Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Torres, spokesman for the disaster agency. He said most of the people who died had drowned in flash floods.
“Our troops are working round the clock to clear the roads ahead of thousands of Filipinos returning from the provinces to visit dead relatives,” Torres said, referring to the marking of the Day of the Dead, which fell on Sunday.
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