Flooding, landslides kill 18 in Vietnam

NGHIA QUANG COMMUNE, Vietnam - Rising floodwater and landslides triggered by a typhoon have killed 18 people and left 23 missing in northern and central Vietnam, where the lives of thousands are at risk, officials said on Friday.

Flooding after typhoon Lekima hit on Wednesday night has killed four people and swept away 16 others in the central province of Nghe An, state-run Voice of Vietnam radio cited provincial and military reports as saying.

"Waters are extremely high and strong now," senior Nghe An People's Committee official Nguyen Van Hanh said.

Landslides cut all roads and telecoms links with Nghe An's mountainous district of Que Phong, making it hard to immediately assess the damage.

In Thanh Hoa province, north of Nghe An, police and soldiers helped move 21,630 people away from a dam, while two drowned in floods that inundated more than 2,300 homes, media reports said.

A further 14,000 people were scheduled to be moved on Friday night to higher ground in the northern province of Ninh Binh as officials needed to break parts of a river dyke to ease flood tension, a provincial official told Tien Phong newspaper.

In the northern mountainous province of Son La, landslides killed three people including two children on Friday and four others were swept by floods, the radio report said.

Nine others died in several central provinces as typhoon Lekima -- the Vietnamese name of a fruit -- made land on Wednesday night, displacing more than 80,000 people and damaging nearly 77,000 houses.

It sank fishing vessels, knocked down electricity poles, ruined nearly 36,000 ha (90,000 acres) of rice and other crops and damaged irrigation systems and telecoms networks before crossing Laos and moved to Thailand where it weakened.

The government said preliminary damages from the typhoon, the fifth of 2007, stood at 659 billion dong ($41 million).

The three-month flood and storm season often ends this month in Vietnam, which faces up to 10 storms a year, causing millions of dollars in damage and killing hundreds of people.

A government report on Friday said storms and floods have killed 134 people in the Southeast Asian country in the first nine months of this year and caused property damage worth 2.53 trillion dong ($156.5 million).

More than 240,000 people had their homes damaged or destroyed by natural disasters so far this year, it said.

In August a storm and subsequent floods killed nearly 80 people in several central provinces. At the time, officials said hundreds of thousands faced food shortages.

On Thursday the Vietnam Red Cross Association sent blankets, mosquito nets and kettles to victims of typhoon Lekima.