Halloween Floods

On the weekend of the 31st October (Halloween) Hanoi was hit with its worst floods in 35 years. Almost 600mm fell in a 2 days. The strange thing is that we are supposed to be at the start of the dry season (average November rainfall is only 40mm). The locals are saying this must be proof of climate change.

The rain started with a bang early on the Friday morning and just kept going and going. By the time I went to work, flooding was already widespread. But things got a lot worse through the day. A colleague of mine took 5 hours to travel to work, most of which was spent pushing her broken-down motorbike through waist-deep floodwaters! By lunchtime, my office building was surrounded by floodwaters and our street had become a river.

Heading home later that evening was a challenge and my moto taxi driver did well to get me back home to my suburb, Ngoc Ha. But even he wasn’t prepared to drive down the lane to my house...that was for me to walk through.

The rain really was unbelievable. To put things in perspective, 600mm is about the total annual average rainfall for Paris and about half that for Sydney. Hanoi’s average annual rainfall is 1.7m so this storm was huge even by this city’s wet standards. I was at home in Newcastle (Australia) in June 2007 for the worst floods there on record (300mm in 6 hours) so I can at least say that I have been getting some good first hand experience of major flooding events - good for a water engineer like myself!

The impacts of the floods across Hanoi were devastating: 92 deaths, 40000 residents evacuated and a damage bill exceeding US$2 billion. Thousands of houses are still without power, 2 weeks after the flood event. Agriculture in the Hanoi region was particularly badly hit and food prices for some vegetables increased tenfold overnight. Despite this, I have been amazed by how the Hanoi people seem to have taken all this in their stride, cleaned up the mess, and carried on with their daily lives without too much fuss. They are a hardy lot, these Hanoians…

My Work

It’s now been 4 weeks since I started work at UNESCO Hanoi. Here’s a quick summary of what UNESCO is all about and where I work.

For those not familiar with UNESCO, it stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. It’s probably most recognised for overseeing the determination and management of World Heritage Sites, of which there are 5 in Vietnam (the most famous being Ha Long Bay and the Hue Citadel). UNESCO is what’s known as a specialised UN agency and is actually only a very small part of the overall UN system. There are another 25 or so organisations which make up the UN, and most of them are represented in Vietnam. The total UN puzzle is pretty crazy and I don’t think I’ll ever work it out.

I have at least figured out our office structure. The head of the office is a Danish lady who’s the UNESCO Vietnam Representative and Office Manager so she pretty much runs the show. The rest of the office consists of 25 local and international staff which make up the Culture, Education, Communications and Admin teams, and ofcourse the one-man Science team (that’s me!).
The UNESCO Hanoi offices are actually quite close to my home. It’s less than 2km and I get a moto taxi there in the morning (10,000 Dong, or less than AU$1) and walk home in the evening. Because the office is also centrally located and close to the old quarter and Hoan Kiem, it’s also great for eating out at lunch or catching up with friends after work.

The office building itself is a beautiful old French colonial house, which has been restored.

I spent the first couple of weeks in what I can only guess was the old maid’s quarters. I was sharing this office with a Vietnamese lady, called Huong Nguyen Thanh, or NT Huong for short. I only mention her name because I have recently been moved to sit next to my supervisor, another Vietnamese lady called Huong Nguyen Thanh Thi, or NTT Huong for short! Anyway, my new office is what used to be the main balcony of the house which has now been enclosed and fitted out with 4 desks side by side. My 3 Vietnamese balcony mates are great company and we are also joined by the office cat on most days.

I’m still familiarising myself with the projects I will be working on (and taking over from NTT – she’s about to about to go off and have a baby) so there’s not much to report on yet. However I have started helping out on the Ha Long Bay project which involves the development of environmental and planning studies and a visitor management study. More on this and my other projects some other time…