Tropical storm Durian kills at least 55 in Vietnam
HANOI - At least 55 people died and 26 were missing when severe tropical storm Durian hit Vietnam, destroying houses and sinking boats after wreaking deadly havoc in the Philippines, officials said.
The storm was downgraded from the powerful typhoon that left more than 1,200 people dead or missing when it triggered a mudslide in the Philippines.
Twenty-eight people died and sixteen were missing in Ba Ria-Vung Tau, east of Ho Chi Minh City, in a province which has tourist resorts and offshore oil rigs, said Nguyen Ngoc Loc of the flood and storm control committee.
In the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre, 17 people were reported dead and there were fears of more casualties in the poor and geographically flat region, where many people live in wooden huts or on house boats.
Durian made landfall in southern Vietnam overnight, with lashing rains and wind speeds of nearly 120 kilometres (75 miles) per hour, smashing thousands of houses, uprooting trees and bringing down power lines.
It sank more than 800 boats moored on a remote South China Sea island before brushing Ho Chi Minh City, the country's largest city, and heading southwest across the Mekong Delta.
The Vietnamese island of Phu Quy, 250 kilometres (150 miles) east of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, suffered heavy damage as the storm lifted the roofs off more than 1,000 houses, but there were no reported casualties.
Two people were reported dead in Tien Giang province, two were missing and 20 were injured, said flood and storm control committee official Nguyen Duc Thinh.
"More than 6,600 houses were damaged and 26 schools unroofed," he said, adding that authorities had evacuated nearly 13,000 people.
Two more people were killed by falling trees in Binh Thuan province, three people died in Phu Yen province, and one was killed in Vinh Long, with three more missing, officials said.
Meteorologists had expected the storm to hit further north, where troops had helped Monday in evacuating tens of thousands of people, but preventive action in the provinces further south appears to have averted a worse disaster.
"We had evacuated 3,500 people," said Tran Thi Luan, head of the Ben Tre provincial flood and storm control committee.
"If the evacuation had not happened, the toll would have become much higher. The storm was really strong."
Wind speeds slowed to 100 km/h in the afternoon, when Luan said "the weather seems to be better, but we do not dare yet tell people that the storm is over, because this is a really complicated storm."
Ho Chi Minh City escaped the worst as the eye of the storm passed to the south. Vietnam television, however, said two people were killed in the country's business capital.
More than 8,000 people were evacuated from high-risk areas, but there were still fears for some people missing.
Officials in the seaside resort of Nha Trang said they had no immediate reports of casualties.
Communist Vietnam, which in May lost more than 240 fishermen and scores of boats to typhoon Chanchu, days ago barred fishing vessels from leaving harbour and warned those at sea to seek shelter to avoid the typhoon.
Central Vietnam was in October hit by typhoon Xangsane, which killed at least 70 people and brought widespread flooding and destruction.
Agence France Presse - December 5, 2006.
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