Millions of goods and major infrastructures have been destroyed after a landslide and floods triggered by Typhoon Yagi hit Vietnam.
Aside from that, 59 people have been confirmed dead after emergency officials conducted head counts as well as search and rescue operations within the affected communities.
Among the victims were six people, including a newborn baby and a one-year-old boy, who were killed in a landslide in the Hoang Lien Son mountains of northwestern Vietnam.
Similarly, other victims included a family of four who were killed after heavy rain caused a hillside to collapse onto a house in mountainous Hoa Binh province in northern of the country.
On Monday, findings revealed that the typhoon made landfall on Vietnam’s northeastern coast, home to large manufacturing operations of domestic and foreign companies, and was downgraded to a tropical depression.
The Vietnamese government said the storm disrupted power supplies and telecommunications in several parts of the country, mostly in Quang Ninh and Hai Phong in the northeast.
In addition, managers and workers at industrial parks and factories in Haiphong, a coastal city of two million, said they had no electricity and were trying to salvage equipment from rain in plants whose metal sheets roofing had been blown away.
“Everyone is scrambling to make sites safe and stocks dry,” said Bruno Jaspaert, head of DEEP C industrial zones, which host plants from more than 150 investors in Haiphong and the neighboring province of Quang Ninh.
Also the LG Electronics, a major maker of appliance and consumer electronics, said there were no casualties among its employees and acknowledged damages at its production site, noting a warehouse with refrigerators and washing machines had been flooded.
“Lots of damages,” said Hong Sun, the chairman of the South Korean business association in Vietnam, when asked about the typhoon’s impact on Korean factories in coastal areas.
Additionally, a manager of leased factories confirmed widespread damages to roofs and prolonged power cuts in northern provinces.
Similarly, at Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 70km (43 miles) up the coast from the city, the disaster management authority said 30 vessels sank after being pounded by strong wind and waves.
The typhoon also damaged nearly 3,300 houses and more than 120,000 hectares (296,500 acres) of crops in the north of the country, the authority said.
The weather agency has warned of more floods and landslides, noting that rainfall had ranged between 208mm and 433mm (8.2 inches to 17 inches) in several parts of the region over the past 24 hours.
“Floods and landslides are damaging the environment and threatening people’s lives,” the National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting said in a report.
