TIG Post

Tag: typhoon

  • Over 150 dead in Vietnam as typhoon floods capital

    Over 150 dead in Vietnam as typhoon floods capital

    The death toll of Typhoon Yagi has risen to 152 in Vietnam, according to government estimates, as one of the country’s largest rivers reaches its highest level in two decades, flooding the streets of Hanoi.

    By Wednesday, flood waters from the swollen Red River reached a meter high in parts of the capital, forcing some residents to navigate their neighbourhoods by boat.

    Thousands of people have evacuated from low-lying areas of the city, and 10 of Hanoi’s 30 administrative districts are on “flood alert,” state media reported.
    Floods and landslides across northern Vietnam have been the main causes of death from the typhoon, the government said.

    “This is the worst flood I have seen,” Hanoi resident Tran Le Quyen told Reuters news agency. “It was dry yesterday morning. Now the entire street is flooded. We couldn’t sleep last night.”

    Yagi, which was initially classified as a super typhoon—the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane—but later downgraded to a tropical depression, has continued to wreak havoc in Vietnam since making landfall on Saturday.


    It has been described as Asia’s most powerful typhoon this year.

    “My home is now part of the river,” Nguyen Van Hung, who lives in a neighbourhood on the banks of the Red River, told Reuters.

    A devastating flash flood wiped out an entire village in northern Lao Cai province on Tuesday, leaving at least 25 confirmed dead. Rescue efforts are underway, with hundreds of soldiers dispatched to search for those still unaccounted for.

    Meanwhile, authorities are closely monitoring a hydropower plant in Yen Bai province, as a massive influx of water into the dam’s reservoir raises fears of a potential collapse.

    Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Nguyen Hoang Hiep, assured the public on Wednesday that the plant remains stable but advised nearby residents to remain indoors as water levels could take up to two days to return to a safer level.

    The flash floods were triggered by Typhoon Yagi, which has wreaked havoc across northern Vietnam for the past four days. On Monday, the storm destroyed a major bridge, sending ten cars and two scooters plunging into the Red River.

    The typhoon has also caused widespread damage to homes, factories, and infrastructure, tearing off roofs and uprooting trees.

  • Okinawa hit by Typhoon Khanun following two deadly storms in East Asia

    Southern Japan has been hit by a typhoon, which has forced evacuations and lost electricity to one-third of the households on the Okinawa islands.

    Slow-moving The greatest rains Beijing has seen in more than a century could get worse thanks to Khanun, the third typhoon to batter east Asia in as many weeks.

    According to experts, this kind of extreme weather will happen more frequently as a result of global warming.

    Following Talim and Doksuri, two previous typhoons that flooded Taiwan and the Philippines in recent weeks and killed more than 30 people, comes Khanun. It was projected to make landfall on China’s northeast coast on Wednesday but estimates now say it is more likely to turn towards the Japanese mainland without striking China.

    The strongest winds from Khanun, with gusts of 252 km/h (156 mph), are predicted to hit Japan’s subtropical Okinawa islands on Wednesday. At Okinawa’s Naha airport, roughly 900 flights have been cancelled and about 20,000 people have been warned to evacuate. The island’s busiest travel period is currently. At this time of the year in Japan, such powerful storms are uncommon.

    However, climate experts have long issued warnings that warming temperatures would increase the ferocity and frequency of storms and heatwaves, both of which have recently affected portions of Asia.

    Professor of urban climate at Singapore Management University Winston Chow compares the harsh weather to a roulette game in which players wager on the red and black squares. He asserts that climate change has increased the likelihood of an extreme weather occurrence, such as a ball landing on a red square.

    The probabilities are that we will land on the red more frequently each year as a result of the fact that the more emissions we produce, the more black squares turn red.

    Since late last week, the combined impact of three storms has soaked the northern Chinese cities of Tianjin and Hebei Province as well as Beijing. Images posted on official television showed people shovelling mud out of their homes in Beijing’s Mentougou district’s hard-hit foothill communities as authorities cleared roads and bridges of rocks and downed trees.

    The past two days have seen the “heaviest rainfall in 140 years” in Beijing alone, according to officials, who have issued a warning of additional “significant rainfall”.

    As rivers surge and dams threaten to burst in the Philippines, huge areas in the capital city of Manila are still underwater, displacing roughly 300,000 people.

    Last week, while Doksuri meandered away from the nation’s west coast and Khanun strengthened in the east, a ferry collapsed in choppy waters south of Manila, killing 26 people.

    The storms have also caused flooding, fires, and destruction of infrastructure throughout the area, requiring sporadic closures of businesses and schools.

    Large portions of Asia were impacted by oppressive heatwaves prior to the typhoons.

    While portions of China experienced record-high temperatures in the middle of July, more than 9,000 people in Japan were hospitalised for heatstroke.

    Typhoons’ destructive power over land could quadruple by the end of the 21st century, according to a study on the impact of typhoons between 1979 and 2016 that was published in 2021 in Frontiers in Earth Science.