Easy does it: A woman on a motorbike losing balance from the strong winds of Yagi in Hai Phong city. — AFP
Asia’s most powerful storm this year, Typhoon Yagi, was downgraded to a tropical depression yesterday, after wreaking havoc in northern Vietnam, China’s Hainan and the Philippines, claiming dozens of lives, according to preliminary reports.
Vietnam’s meteorological agency issued the downgrade yesterday but cautioned about the ongoing risk of flooding and landslides as the storm, the strongest to hit the country in decades, moves westwards.
Yagi, packing winds exceeding 149km per hour, disrupted power supplies and telecommunications in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, causing extensive flooding, felling thousands of trees and damaging homes on Saturday.
The government said the storm has led to at least three deaths in Hanoi, a city of 8.5 million, with these figures being preliminary.
Fourteen people have died in Vietnam so far, according to reports, including four from a landslide in the province of Hoa Binh, about 100m south of Hanoi.
A family of four was killed in a landslide in the mountainous Hoa Binh province of northern Vietnam early yesterday morning, according to state media.
The landslide happened around midnight, after several hours of heavy rain brought by Yagi, when a hillside gave way and collapsed onto a house, VNExpress said, citing local authorities.
A 53-year-old motorcyclist was killed after a tree fell on him in the northern Hai Duong province, state media reported. At least one body was recovered from the sea near the coastal city of Halong, where a dozen people were missing at sea.
Yagi has claimed the lives of four people on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, according to the latest update from local authorities.
The civil defence office in the Philippines, the first country Yagi hit after forming last week, raised the death toll there to 20 from 16 and said 22 people remained missing.
After it made landfall in Vietnam on Saturday afternoon, Yagi triggered waves as high as 4m in coastal provinces, leading to extended power and telecommunication outages that have complicated damage assessment, the government said.
The meteorological agency warned of continued “risk of flash floods near small rivers and streams, and landslides on steep slopes in many places in the northern mountainous areas” and the coastal province of Thanh Hoa.
Relative calm returned yesterday morning to Hanoi, where authorities rushed to clean up streets from toppled trees scattered across the city centre and other neighbourhoods.
“The storm has devastated the city. Trees fell down on top of people’s houses, cars and people on the street,” said 57-year-old Hanoi resident Hoang Ngoc Nhien.
Hanoi’s Noi Bai international airport, the busiest in northern Vietnam, reopened yesterday after closing on Saturday morning.
In Hainan, preliminary estimates suggested significant economic losses and widespread power outages, according to emergency response authorities cited by state-run Hainan Daily. — Reuters
