Mekong Delta braces for storm season swayed by climate change

Update: 14/05/2009
Weather experts are worried that Mekong Delta residents remain indifferent to or unaware of the threat posed by climate change to the upcoming storm season. Bui Minh Tang, director of the Central Hydrometeorology Forecast Center, told a seminar in Can Tho City Monday that the delta would face bigger storms than usual because of climate change.

He said it was dangerous that residents are not taking the threat seriously enough.

Nguyen Huu Loi, vice chairman of the Can Tho City People’s Committee, said the impact of climate change on the delta was “obvious.”

Tides in the city have risen by an average of four centimeters every year since 2004, and as a result, it has been hit by more frequent and severe flooding, badly affecting daily life as well as production, he said.

Nguyen Xuan Hong, vice chairman of Ca Mau Province People’s Committee, said high tides worsened by climate change last year destroyed 1,000 hectares of rice fields and shrimp farms in the province.

Around ten storms and tropical depressions are expected to form in the East Sea and six or seven of them will directly affect Vietnam, Tang told the seminar.

He said the storms will be “complicated” and move at high speeds, and locals not familiar with such intensity are likely to be unprepared to deal with them

Hong of Ca Mau Province said 16 residents of the southernmost province were killed in storms last year, 14 others were missing, 28 injured and 43 vessels sunk.

An official from Ben Tre Province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development said every time a storm is detected in the East Sea “it’s hard to evacuate people from the islets near the sea.”

The official suggested forcing people to take refuge by imposing a cash penalty on families who refuse to evacuate and requiring sailors to bear expenses for all the damage incurred to their vessels if they insist on staying offshore.

Loi said houses in the Mekong Delta are not normally strong enough to withstand heavy storms, so there should be underground tunnels to shelter people from them.

The Ben Tre official proposed the building of shelters for storm refugees.

Hong demanded special rescue measures for Ca Mau Province, including the building of dykes along the coast. The province is surrounded by the sea on three sides.

Cao Duc Phat, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, told the seminar one of his memories of storm Durian that hit south and central areas in 2006 was that several southerners put sandbags on their roofs to keep the roof from being blown off.

“If the roof is not blown off, the walls are also safe,” he said, calling for the widespread use of sandbags in preparations for the storm season.

He also promised the government would invest in building refuge tunnels and storm shelters.

Five natural disasters that hit the country last year – a severe cold spell in the north, historic floods in Hanoi, record high tides in Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta, unseasonal flooding in the central region, and storms in the northern mountains – inflicted a heavy toll.

They left 537 people dead or missing and property losses of about VND13 trillion (US$730.7 million), according to the Central Steering Committee for Storm and Flood Control and Prevention.

 

Source: VietNamNet/TN