Evacuated return home in Vietnam, typhoon toll rises to 63
HANOI - Vietnam's death toll from Typhoon Damrey rose to 63 as many of the 300,000 people evacuated ahead of the storm trickled back to their devastated villages and towns across the country's north.
Six people died in central Nghe An province in the floods sparked by the storm, which rocked vast swathes of East Asia for more than a week, according the region's flood control official Ha Huy Thong.
Officials earlier said 57 people had died across northern Vietnam, 51 of them in the interior Yen Bai province alone, where flood control official Nguyen Dinh Vo said 33 bodies had been recovered by Friday.
"Military forces have been helping us in clearing the damage caused by flooding," Vo said. "We give priority to finding the bodies of dead people, and are trying to trace those missing."
Officials have said the numbers missing could not be ascertained as entire families had been washed away.
The typhoon, packing winds of 200 kilometres (125 miles) per hour, left at least 111 people dead during its sweep through East Asia -- 63 in Vietnam, 25 in China, 16 in the Philippines, and seven in Thailand.
In addition, a suspected cholera outbreak in the typhoon-hit eastern Philippines had killed nine people with nearly 200 hospitalized, a military official in Legaspi city said.
Flood official Thong in Vietnam's Nghe An province said: "People evacuated have been coming back to their houses." But he noted that hundreds of houses had been flooded or had their roofs blown off.
"We haven't really rehabilitated these houses as we are still waiting for more support from the provincial and central level," Thong said.
Elsewhere in Vietnam thousands of houses and other buildings were reported to have been blown away, with scores of kilometres of sea dykes breached.
Infrastructure including power and communications was disrupted and roads washed away in several provinces.
Trees were uprooted and landslides occurred in several places.
The typhoon, which Vietnamese officials described as the most violent in a decade, also flooded vast areas of agricultural land.
Asia is prone to tropical storms and typhoons, two of which caused widespread destruction in China and killed scores of people earlier this month.
Agence France Presse - September 30, 2005.
|