This flood has severly destroyed mountainous provinces in the North of Vietnam. According to preliminary statistics, 128 people have been killed, 41 missed, 108 injured, 798 houses have been collapsed and swept away; 17,888 houses have been flooded and damaged, of which nearly 8,000 houses in Yen Bai located along Red River have been flooded, including 4,000 houses in Tran Yen district. Dozens of thousands of running water wells of people have been flooded, a range of concentrated living water facilities have been destroyed, resulting in a serious shortage of living water.

Mr Vu Van Ba - secretary of the Party’s commune committee of Dao Thinh Commune, Yen Bai province, honestly reported that his commune had 178 flooded houses, i.e the same number of water wells is flooded or polluted. This is the most serious flood in the history, many families had to take rain water for use, but when it stopped raining, people did not know where to get clean water because contaminated water is found everywhere.

During those rainy days, only some lucky people were given several bottles of purified water for drinking and they had no way but taking water from the river for cooking. Ironically, they lived “together with” water but had no clean water to use; they suffered from this situation for three–four stormy days. To make things worse, when floods went away, many families had walk 2-3 km walk for geting a bucket of water for use, let alone where to take water for bathing, cleaning, washing…

August 14th, in the morning, the Director of the Centre for Rual Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation of Yen Bai province, Nguyen Van Tich broke a good news to me: “This morning, 1,000 kg of PUR has been given to the National Centre for Rural Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation by UNCEF to people in Phu Tho, Lao Cai and Yen Bai provinces for domestic water treatment. PUR is a special chemical that can purify river water within five minutes after being evenly mixed and exterminate water-living bacterium, and users can drink such water only after 20 minutes”.

Dao Thinh commune is one of the communes which were the most severly destroyed by the floods. After flood water went down, evacuated people came back home to repair their houses but they suffered from shortage of domestic water, especially water for cooking. Though wells were cleaned, water remained turbid like so called “fish eyes” that is so fishy that nobody can swallow if it is used for cooking! Ms.Tran Thi Nga, whose house is located near Dao Thinh bridge, sadly said: such water can only be temporily used for bathing, cleaning or washing, but for cooking, we had ask for water from households living around hills . How miserable we are!

After giving 300 kg of PUR to the provincial Preventive Health Centre, the Centre for Rural Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation of Yen Bai province directly gave 50 kg to people, whose houses were flooded, in Dao Thinh and Nga Quan communes and instructed them how to treat waste water. The water level of Hong River remained high, in some sections of the road along the River bank, the water is so flooded that half of the wheel is under the water. The water trace on tree-trunks and house walls shows that housetops of people in communes of Tuy Lo, Nga Quan, Viet Thanh, Dao Thinh … are over the water food level. At this time, on sunken areas, fields next to canals are still inundated.

Thai Sinh

Source: Vietnam Agriculture Newspaper Volume 166 on August 19th, 2008