Vietnam village begins with climate rescue after landslides. world News

Lao Cai: The small verge of Guayin Thi Kim is no longer present in North Vietnam, last year wipes in a landslide starting with the disastrous heavy rains of Typhoon Yagi.
He and dozens of people have been transferred to a site that authorities hope that future climate change disasters will withstand disasters, strong houses, drainage canals and with a gentler topography that reduces landslides risks.
This is an example of communities of challenges around the world for climate change, including more intense rains and flash floods like the typhoon Yagi brought in the last September.
Kim lost 14 relatives and her traditional wooden stilt, when Yagi’s rain exposed a landslide, which was connected to Lang Nu village in the hill Lao Cai Province,
The storm was the strongest to hit Vietnam in decades, killing at least 320 people in the country and an estimated $ 1.6 billion in economic losses.
This is unlikely to be an outsider, although typhoon in the area is faster and faster on the ground due to showing climate change with research last year.
Climate change, due to large -scale fossil fuel burning, affects typhoon in many ways: a hot environment keeps more water, causing heavy rains, and hot oceans also help fuel in tropical storms.
Kim is shocked by landslides.
She says that everything is painful, especially an edge of the memory of that moment was swept away by her and her two -year -old daughter.
“This disaster was very big for all of us,” he said that the pair was drawn from mud hours after remembering that moment.
The 28 -year -old told AFP, “I still cannot talk about it without crying. I can’t forget.”
‘We need to change’
Yagi hit Vietnam with winds of more than 149 km (92 mi) per hour and brought a holocaust of rain, causing devastating floods in Laos, Thailand and parts of Myanmar.
In Lang Nu, 67 residents were killed, and the authorities vowed to reconstruct the houses of the survivors in a safe place.
By December, 40 new houses were ready at a site about two kilometers away.
It was chosen for its height, which should be less affected by adjacent streams, and its relatively soft slope shield.
“It is really very difficult to predict complete security in geology,” said Hanoi University of Geology and Mining Rector Tran Than Hai.
But the site is safe, “to do best of our knowledge and understanding”.
Lao Cai is one of the poorest areas of Vietnam, which has very little money for expensive warning systems.
However, a simple drainage system runs through the new community, which removes the water from the slope.
This should reduce soil saturation and the possibility of another landslide, scientists working on the site told AFP.
The new houses of the village are made of strong concrete instead of traditional wood.
Kim said, “We want to follow our traditions, but if it is not safe now, we need to change,” Kim said, staring at the expansion of mud and rock where his old village was standing once.
Months later it remains frozen in time, caught in landslides with children’s toys, kitchen pan and motorcycle helmets.
‘Serviced land for us’
Like Kim, 41 -year -old Hoang Thai Bay now lives with a steel structural beam in a modern steel house in a new village.
His roof was once made of palm leaves, now corrugated iron and its doors are aluminum glass.
She survived landslides strict from a single concrete column in her old house as a wall of mud and rocks in her old house.
“I still get up at night, paying attention to what happened,” he told AFP.
“Our old house was big and good, with gardens and fields. But I sleep here in a new house and I feel very safe,” she said.
Even on the new site, there are houses, risks for about 70 people, warned Hai.
Development that changes the slope of the slope, or the construction area of ​​dams or reservoirs in the area can make the area more landslide.
Construction of more houses or new roads in the immediate region, or losing protective forest cover that keeps the Earth in place, can also make the site unsafe, a professor at the Geotechnics Institute of Geotechnics and Environment at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi.
Yagi erased large areas of mature natural forest in Lao Cai and while private companies donated trees for planting, it is not clear that they can provide great protection.
“In the context of the prevention of landslides, the only forest that can have good (protective) effects, rainforests with too much density of trees, the so -called primary forest,” a specialist of disaster risk maps stated that it helped to choose the new site.
It was difficult for Kim to leave the old community, whose family lived there for almost half a century and cultivated there.
But he is grateful that he and the remaining people have another chance.
“I believe this is the safest base for us.”