HA LONG: Typhoon Yagi weakened to a tropical depression on Sunday, after killing over a dozen people, tearing roofs off buildings, sinking boats and triggering landslides across Vietnam. The typhoon had left a trail of destruction and two dozen people dead across southern China and the Philippines before it ravaged Vietnam.
A family of four was killed on Sunday after heavy rain caused a hillside to give way and collapse onto a house in the mountainous Hoa Binh province of northern Vietnam. Since Friday, 10 others have been killed in storm-related incidents, some crushed by falling trees or drifting boats, the defence ministry's disaster management agency.
On Sunday afternoon, six more people, including a newborn baby and a one-year-old boy, were killed in a landslide in the Hoang Lien Son Mountains of northwestern Vietnam.
The slide was triggered by heavy rains and high winds after Yagi made landfall on Saturday, but authorities are yet to attribute the deaths to the storm.
"We found the six bodies, including a one-year-old boy and a newborn in the landslide," a local official from the Sapa people's committee said.
While Vietnam's weather agency downgraded the storm on Sunday, several areas of the port city of Hai Phong were under half a metre of flood waters, and electricity was out, with power lines and electric poles damaged.
At Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site about 70 kilometres up the coast from the city, fishermen were in shock as they examined the damage Sunday morning.
The disaster management authority said 30 vessels sank at boat lock areas in coastal Quang Ninh province along Ha Long Bay after being pounded by strong wind and waves.
The typhoon also damaged nearly 3,300 houses, and more than 120,000 hectares of crops in the north of the country, the authority said. Rooftops of buildings were blown off and motorbikes were left toppled over in piles of building debris. Before making landfall in Vietnam on Saturday, Yagi tore through southern China and the Philippines, killing at least 24 people and injuring dozens of others. — AFP
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