Death toll from Typhoon Yagi rises to 63 after devastating northern Vietnam

On September 9, torrential rains and strong winds from Typhoon Yagi devastated northern Vietnam, reportedly killing 49 people, injuring 732 and leaving dozens more missing.

During the week of September 3, Yagi killed at least 20 people in the Philippines and four more in southern China. The total death toll now stands at at least 63. The victims included an infant and a one-year-old child, Vietnamese media reported.

The storm is the strongest in the region in ten years, with wind speeds exceeding 230 kilometers per hour. It has destroyed bridges, factories and farms, caused power outages and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

The typhoon has now weakened to a tropical depression, but authorities are warning of further possible flooding and landslides in the coming days. Thirteen regions in Vietnam are under high risk for flash floods after the storm.

More than 3,500 households in Yen Bai in northeast Vietnam will evacuated after rising water levels in the Red River. A bridge there collapsed on the morning of September 9, as vehicles crossed the intersection.

A 2018 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lists Vietnam as one of the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, citing rising sea levels and more intense storms.

“Extreme weather events will continue to occur as they are now, but they will occur faster than expected, be more intense, more frequent and more difficult to predict,” Dao Xuan Lai, chief of the climate change and environment division at the United Nations Development Programme’s Vietnam office, told Mongabay.

Banner image: Satellite images of Typhoon Yagi in the South China Sea on September 4. Image by NOAA (public domain).