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 Newc
astle (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…
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 Newc
astle (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…
1 comment:
cool blog post, awesome photos! (especially the one of the guy with chairs strapped to his feet... maybe those torturous high heels i insist on wearing will one day turn out to be the warm-up for a flood crisis response).
juliette
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