NHA TRANG, VIETNAM—The deadliest storm of the year has unleashed its fury on Southeast Asia for a second time, as Typhoon Kalmaegi—after killing at least 114 people and leaving over a hundred missing in the Philippines—made a destructive landfall in central Vietnam on Thursday.
Vietnamese authorities ordered mass evacuations and canceled hundreds of flights as the powerful storm, packing winds of up to 149 kilometers per hour, hammered provinces that were already reeling from weeks of relentless, record-breaking rainfall and devastating floods.
Philippines: A State of National Calamity
The scale of the devastation left behind in the central Philippines has been described by officials as “unprecedented.”
- Mass Fatalities and Displacement: Official figures confirmed at least 114 deaths and 127 people still missing, with the majority of casualties attributed to drowning in severe flash floods and landslides. Over 500,000 Filipinos were displaced by the disaster.
- Cebu Hit Hardest: The hardest-hit region was the central province of Cebu, which accounted for the bulk of the confirmed fatalities. Rescuers there are navigating streets choked with debris, flattened homes, and overturned vehicles, with the arduous task of distributing aid hampered by the sheer scale of destruction.
- Marcos Declares Emergency: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. declared a “state of national calamity” on Thursday, a move designed to fast-track emergency funding for relief and recovery efforts and impose price ceilings on essential goods to prevent hoarding.
The devastation in Cebu comes just weeks after the region was struck by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake, leaving communities with little time to recover before Kalmaegi delivered its destructive blow.
Vietnam Braces for a “Very Abnormal” Storm
As the storm moved across the South China Sea, it regained strength before slamming into Vietnam’s central coast north of Gia Lai province, compounding a crisis in an area already saturated by prior weather events.
- Pre-Existing Floods: Central Vietnamese provinces, including the UNESCO-listed town of Hoi An and the coastal city of Hue, were still dealing with the fallout from floods caused by heavy rains that had already claimed dozens of lives earlier this week. Rice farmers, whose livestock and poultry were drowned in the previous floods, expressed crippling fear of further ruin.
- Mass Evacuation: The Vietnamese government placed more than 268,000 soldiers on standby for search and rescue operations and ordered hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate from low-lying and coastal areas, closing six airports and canceling hundreds of domestic flights.
- Economic Impact: Forecasters warned that the typhoon could dump more than 24 inches of rain in some areas, raising fears of deadly landslides and catastrophic flooding, particularly in the Central Highlands, which is Vietnam’s crucial coffee-growing region.
Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha urged local authorities to treat Kalmaegi, the 13th storm to hit the country this year, as “urgent and dangerous,” calling its late-season strength “very abnormal” in a region increasingly vulnerable to climate-change-fueled extreme weather events.
As the storm moves inland, both the Philippines and Vietnam face the grim task of managing immediate humanitarian needs while beginning the long, multi-year process of recovery.