Nguyen Thi Kim’s smaller, rural community in northeastern Vietnam is no longer there, and it was completely destroyed in a flood caused by Typhoon Yagi’s destructive heavy rains last year.
Authorities have relocated her and other survivors to a location with stronger homes, drainage canals, and a nicer terrain that lessens the risk of landslides in the event of future climate change-related disasters.
It is an illustration of the adaptation challenges that communities around the world experience, such as more severe rains and flash floods like those Typhoon Yagi brought next September.
When Yagi’s storms caused a disaster that largely engulfed Lang Nu community in Lao Cai province, Kim lost 14 relatives and her standard wooden stilt home.
Vietnam experienced the strongest storm in decades, killing at least 320 people in the nation and causing an estimated$ 1.6 billion in economic losses as a result.
However, it’s unlikely to be an exception because study from last year demonstrated that typhoons in the area are intensifying more quickly and last long over land.
Thunderstorms are impacted by climate change in a number of ways: warmer oceans help to hold more water, which causes heavier rains, and brighter atmospheres help to support tropical storms.
Kim continues to be traumatized by the disaster.
She claims that everything is painful, particularly the thought of the time when a torrent of mud vanished from her and her two-year-old girl.
She recalled the second the pair were pulled from the dirt hours afterward, saying,” This catastrophe was too great for us all.”
” I also can’t speak about it without crying.” The 28-year-old told AFP,” I doesn’t forget,””.
” We need to modify,” the saying goes.
Winds exceeding 149 kilometers ( 92 miles per hour ) and a torrent of rain in pieces of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar were the result of Yagi’s devastating flood.
Officials in Lang Nu vowed to construct the homes of the 67 residents who died in a secure location.
40 new homes were constructed at a site less than two kilometers apart by December.
Its ascent, which should be minimized by opposite streams, and its relatively gentle hill gradient, made it the choice.
The decision to pick a new page was made by Hanoi University of Geology and Mining pastor Tran Thanh Hai, who said,” Predicting overall health in geography is actually very difficult.”
However,” to the best of our knowledge and understanding,” the website is secure.
With much money for expensive alert systems, Chinese Cai, one of Vietnam’s poorest regions, is.
However, a straightforward drainage system drains water from the hill and passes through the new area.
According to researchers who worked on the site, this may lessen land concentration and the likelihood of a second disaster.
The island’s new houses are all constructed using stronger concrete, as opposed to conventional wood.
We want to adhere to our customs, but if it’s no longer safe, Kim said, gazing at the dirt and rock that once stood in her old town.
Months after, it is still buried in time, strewn with son’s games, kitchen pans, and motorcycle helmets that were swept away in the disaster.
” The best place for us,”
Hoang Thi Bay, 41, is currently residing in the new town in a contemporary stilt home with steel structural columns.
Her gates are aluminum glass, and her roof, which was once made of palm leaf, is now corrugated iron.
As a wall of dirt and stones swept her neighborhood aside, she clung desperately to the one concrete wall in her old apartment.
She told AFP,” I also wake up in the night pondering over what happened.”
Our previous home had gardens and grounds, and was bigger and nicer. But I do think much safer because I sleep in the new home.
There are challenges, Hai warned, even at the new site, which has approximately 70 residents.
According to him, he said, development that alters the slope’s gradient, as well as the construction of dams or dams in the area, may make the area more prone to landslides.
Would Minh Duc, a teacher at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi, said that adding more homes or new routes to the immediate area or losing the protecting forest cover that holds the earth in place may even make the blog uncomfortable.
In Lao Cai, large areas of adult healthy forest were wiped out by Yagi, and despite private companies providing planting trees, it is questionable whether they offer little protection.
The only forest that can have good ( protective ) effects is rainforest with a very high density of trees, or “primary forest,” according to Duc, an expert on disaster risk maps who also assisted in the selection of the new site.
Kim, whose family had lived and raised there for nearly 50 years, was struggling to leave the old community.
She is appreciative that she and other survivors now have a second chance.
” I think this is the safest place for us to travel.”
