Son Nguyen
Initial estimates put the loss of human lives at nine, plus several missing and hundreds injured, and the total property damages in excess of VND10 trillion.
Quang Binh Province bears the brunt of losses, at over VND8 trillion, or some US$400 million. This amount is roughly equal to half of the province’s gross domestic product, more than three times the province’s annual export revenue, or nearly twice the State budget expenditure in the province. The figures also mean it will take years for the province to recover from the natural disaster.
The big question surfaces in local media as to why losses and damages are so huge for the country despite efforts by all walks of life to fight the disaster. Tropical storms like Wutip as well as similarly-strong typhoons like Xangsane and Chanchu years ago are regular for a coastal country like Vietnam, and are deemed force majeure. The grave concern is that the country’s capacity to cope with such disasters has not been improved, if not weaker, due to the lack of proactive preparedness. Human intervention in nature is also to blame, says local media.
“Experiences learned from the fight against Xangsane and Chanchu have failed to help,” says Sai Gon Tiep Thi. The crucial point, according to the paper, is not how much time is spent on preparations, but how preparations are done.
In the case of this typhoon, which made landfall on Monday and battered a large swath of central localities, losses and damages are caused not only by the deadly wind and gust, but also by the devastating flash flood triggered by both downpours and discharge of water from reservoirs.
“Numerous water bombs are there, ready to explode upon external impacts like storms…, as seen in many full reservoirs in the central region from Quang Binh to Thua Thien-Hue,” says the paper.
Floods normally can be hindered or minimized by the forest, but the rate of deforestation in the recent past has been accelerating due to the rampant development of hydropower projects, according to Dan Viet. The consequences are more storms and floods.
Between 2006 and now, over 50,000 hectares of forest has been logged down for hydropower schemes, while project owners have replanted only 1,000 hectares in compensation, says the online paper.
The victims’ grievances are further aggravated these days when numerous reservoirs in the central region have been unleashing huge amounts of water to downstream areas, according to Nguoi Lao Dong. On Wednesday, several hydropower dams in Quang Nam Province opened sluice gates, discharging thousands of cubic meters of water per second and causing rivers to swell dangerously. Song Tranh Hydropower Plant, for example, sees water flowing from upstream areas at over 2,200 cubic meters per second, while the power plant when running at full throttle requires only 220 cubic meters, meaning sluice gates must be opened to release the redundant amount.
Or in Nghe An Province, water discharged from Vuc Mau Reservoir this week has flooded a large area downstream, isolating residential quarters with thousands of families, according to Nguoi Lao Dong.
The overheated development of rubber and coffee plantations is another culprit. In a report on “Rubber development and forest protection in Vietnam,” two international organizations Forest Trends and Tropenbos say the policy of rubber expansion in Vietnam has been abused. Under the master plan on rubber development approved by the Prime Minister, the country should have 800,000 hectares under rubber cultivation by 2020, but the acreage by 2012 had already reached 915,000 hectares, meaning forests are being damaged in an uncontrollable manner, according to the report cited by Dan Viet.
Professor Nguyen Van Lung at the Institute of Sustainable Forest management and certification of Vietnam, charges in Dan Viet that “wrong policies (on hydropower and rubber development) are causing grave consequences to the people.”
Lao Dong says the strong typhoon has revealed problems with irrigation and hydropower reservoirs in the central region, from Thanh Hoa and Nghe An to Daklak and Gia Lai. Discharge of water from such reservoirs has caused man-made disasters to overlap natural calamities, leaving incredible destruction to the people’s assets and their own lives.
Ahead of the typhoon, preparations were limited to mass evacuation of the people to safer places to avoid the loss of lives, but damages to the people’s properties have been unavoidable. Such preparations cannot be seen as proactive, as authorities have yet to touch on the problem of deadly water bombs at reservoirs that are always in the red alert, says Sai Gon Tiep Thi. For active preparedness, “there must be long-term solutions to fighting storms, especially the development of infrastructure, hydropower works and other civil works able to withstand disasters,” says the paper.
The Saigon Times Daily
Đăng ký: VietNam News
