Originally published 2020-10-22.
Floodwater up to the rooftops of homes in central Vietnam, and a resident wading through a flooded street, October 2020.
In October 2020, central Vietnam was hit by its worst flooding in decades. A run of tropical storms dropped weeks of extreme rain on the narrow strip of provinces between the mountains and the sea, from Quảng Bình down through Quảng Trị and Thừa Thiên Huế. By 20 October more than 100 people had died, around 178,000 homes were under water and close to 100,000 people had been forced from their homes. Further storms in late October and November pushed the toll higher, to more than 240 people dead or missing in Vietnam by the start of December.
This article explains what happened, why the region was hit so hard, the landslides that killed rescuers, how the disaster overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic and what recovery involved.
A season of back-to-back storms
Central Vietnam floods most years; the autumn rainy season is part of life there. What made 2020 different was the sequence. Between early October and late November, at least eight tropical systems affected the region:
- Linfa, which came ashore in Quảng Ngãi on 11 October, flooding more than 100,000 houses.
- Nangka and Ofel in mid-October, adding rain to land that was already saturated.
- Saudel in late October.
- Molave, the strongest, which struck from 27 to 29 October and damaged or destroyed more than 56,000 houses. About 1.3 million people were evacuated ahead of it.
- Goni, Etau and Vamco in November, keeping rivers high for weeks.
Each storm on its own would have been manageable for communities used to seasonal flooding. Together they left no time for water to drain or for people to return home and repair.
The worst-hit provinces
Three provinces bore the brunt of the October flooding:
- Quảng Trị recorded the highest death toll, with 52 dead and two missing, and damage estimated at around $129 million. One station in the province, Hướng Linh, measured more than 3,200 mm of rain over the period, more than many places receive in a year.
- Thừa Thiên Huế, home to the historic city of Huế about 700 km south of Hanoi, saw 31 deaths and widespread flooding of homes, farms and the old imperial city’s surroundings.
- Quảng Bình lost 19 people to floods, and about 95,000 houses were flooded.
Aid workers who knew the region well were struck by how fast the water rose. Michael Brosowski, founder of the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, told The Guardian: “Hue experiences floods each year, but the scale and the speed this year is shocking.” Families who keep raised platforms and boats for the usual floods found those preparations overwhelmed.
Landslides that killed soldiers and rescuers
The rain loosened steep hillsides across the region, and some of the deadliest moments came from landslides rather than rising water.
On 11 October, a landslide at the Rào Trăng 3 hydropower construction site in Thừa Thiên Huế trapped 17 workers. The next day a military rescue team heading to help them was hit by a second slide, killing Major General Nguyễn Văn Man and 12 other soldiers and officials. In Quảng Trị’s Hướng Hóa district, a landslide buried an army barracks in mid-October, killing 22 soldiers, and another killed six members of one family and a rescuer. Reports at the time also described a slide in Quảng Bình that sent an estimated 3,000 tonnes of rock and soil onto homes and roads.
These losses hit Vietnam hard, because the army is central to disaster response and many of those killed had gone into danger to help others.
Why central Vietnam floods so badly
Geography explains much of it. Central Vietnam is a thin coastal plain squeezed between the Trường Sơn (Annamite) mountains and the South China Sea. Rivers there are short and steep, so heavy rain in the mountains reaches towns and rice fields within hours. When storms arrive one after another, the soil cannot absorb more water and every new downpour runs straight off.
Human factors add to the risk. Forest loss on upland slopes, road building and hydropower construction can make hillsides less stable, and Vietnamese officials and experts debated after 2020 how far these contributed to the landslides. Scientists also expect a warmer climate to make extreme rainfall more intense in many parts of Asia, although linking any single season to climate change requires a dedicated attribution study.
A disaster on top of a pandemic
The floods came during the Covid-19 pandemic, which complicated the response. Vietnam, a country of almost 100 million people sharing a long border with China, had by then become known for containing the virus with early border controls, intensive contact tracing, quarantine and targeted lockdowns. Official figures counted only around 1,100 cases and 35 deaths by late October 2020.
Relief agencies worried that crowded evacuation shelters could undo that work, and that families who had lost income during the pandemic were now losing their homes, crops and livestock too. Nguyen Thi Xuan Thu, president of the Vietnam Red Cross Society, said: “These devastating floods are some of the worst we have seen in decades.” Her organisation and its partners delivered food, clean water, tarpaulins and other essentials by boat, helicopter and road.
In the end there was no large outbreak linked to the floods. Vietnam’s biggest Covid wave came later, from April 2021, driven by the Delta variant.
Aid, damage and the long road to recovery
Total losses from the autumn storms were estimated at about 35.8 trillion dong, roughly $1.6 billion. The government allocated 500 billion dong (about $21.5 million) to the five hardest-hit provinces. International support included $3 million from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund, $2 million from the United States, about $3 million from the Asian Development Bank, €1.3 million from the EU, €2 million pledged by the Netherlands and £500,000 from the UK, along with help from South Korea, China, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland and others.
Emergency shelter was only the first step. For farming families, recovery meant replacing drowned livestock, clearing silt from fields, repairing irrigation and finding seed for the next planting. For many households the hardest part came months later, when the news cameras had gone but income had not returned.
If you want to help after disasters like this, cash donations to established organisations such as national Red Cross societies are usually the most useful, because they let local teams buy what is needed close to home and support local markets at the same time.
Sources: Wikipedia: 2020 Central Vietnam floods; Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam. Early figures and quotes as reported by the BBC and The Guardian (October 2020), citing the Vietnam Red Cross Society and IFRC.
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