Vietnam Braces for Storm Wipha After Typhoon Lashes Hong Kong
Wipha is currently near the port city of Beihai in China's Guangxi province, and the US Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecasts the storm will gradually strengthen as it moves across the Gulf of Tonkin. The outer bands of the system are already bringing heavy rainfall to Vietnam's capital of Hanoi.
Gale-force winds lashed Hong Kong on Sunday as Wipha tracked to the south of the city at typhoon-strength, downing trees and leading to flight cancellations. The storm skirted the mainland Chinese coast before crossing near Yangjiang and moving inland on a westerly track toward Vietnam.
Wipha has traversed relatively flat terrain, keeping the system together 'rather nicely' as it heads into the Gulf of Tonkin, according to the JTWC. Warm waters will fuel its development, and Wipha will 'intensify at least to high-end tropical storm strength and potentially back to typhoon-strength prior to landfall in Vietnam,' the JTWC said.
Heavy downpours are forecast for Monday through Wednesday across northeast Vietnam, the Red River Delta, and parts of the North Central coast, with as much as 600 millimeters (24 inches) in some areas, according to the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting.
Vietnam's weather agency warned of a high flooding risk in coastal areas on Tuesday afternoon, particularly in Hung Yen-Quang Ninh near the port city of Haiphong, with storm surges of nearly five meters in some locations. Conditions are also dangerous at sea for all types of vessels as the approaching storm triggers strong winds and high waves, the bureau added.
Wipha developed as an area of low pressure in waters east of the Philippines last week, bringing heavy rain to the country's north. The storm, known locally as Crising, has caused $3.8 million in damage to infrastructure and killed at least five people, the national disaster agency said on Monday.
--With assistance from Neil Jerome Morales.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
36 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Rains wreak havoc in China, over 4,400 evacuated in Beijing area
Heavy rain intensified around Beijing and nearby provinces in northern China on Monday, exacerbating the risks of disasters including landslides and flooding, authorities said, as they relocated more than 4,400 people. Colossal rain continued to pound the northwestern suburban area of Miyun in Beijing causing flash floods and landslides, and many villages were affected, state broadcaster CCTV reported.(AP) Colossal rain continued to pound the northwestern suburban area of Miyun in Beijing causing flash floods and landslides, and many villages were affected, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Images circulated on China's Wechat app showed areas of Miyun where cars and trucks were floating on a flooded road where water levels had risen so high that it had submerged part of a residential building. Northern China has seen record precipitation in recent years, exposing densely populated cities, including Beijing, to flood risks. Some scientists link the increased rainfall in China's usually arid north to global warming. The storms are part of the broader pattern of extreme weather across China due to the East Asian monsoon, which has caused disruptions in the world's second-largest economy. Xiwanzi Village in Shicheng Town, near Miyun Reservoir, was severely affected, CCTV said on Monday with an additional 100 villagers transferred to a primary school for shelter. It comes after the maximum flood peak flow into the Miyun reservoir reached a record high of 6550 cubic meters per second, Beijing authorities said on Sunday. In neighbouring Shanxi province, videos from state media showed roads inundated by strong gushing currents and submerged vegetation including crops and trees. In Beijing's Pinggu District, two high-risk road sections have been sealed, authorities said. Authorities are carrying out search and rescue work across cities including Datong, where a driver in a Ford car has lost contact while driving in the floods, the People's Daily reported. China's Water Resources Ministry has issued targeted flood warnings to 11 provinces and regions, including Beijing and neighbouring Hebei, for floods from small and midsize rivers and mountain torrents. Two were dead and two missing in Hebei province, CCTV said on Sunday morning. Overnight rain dumped a record 145 mm (5.7 inches) per hour on Fuping in the industrial city of Baoding. China's National Development and Reform Commission said on Monday that it was urgently arranging 50 million yuan ($6.98 million) to support Hebei. The funds would be used to repair damaged roads and bridges, water conservancy embankments, schools and hospitals in the disaster area. The NDRC said it was "promoting the restoration of normal life and production as soon as possible." Chinese authorities closely monitor extreme rainfall and severe flooding are, as they challenge the country's ageing flood defences, threaten to displace millions and wreak havoc on China's $2.8 trillion agricultural sector.
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
Rains intensify around Beijing, 4,400 evacuated in China
Heavy rain intensified around Beijing and nearby provinces in northern China on Monday, exacerbating the risks of disasters including landslides and flooding, authorities said, as they relocated more than 4,400 people. Colossal rain continued to pound the northwestern suburban area of Miyun in Beijing causing flash floods and landslides, and many villages were affected, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Images circulated on China's Wechat app showed areas of Miyun where cars and trucks were floating on a flooded road where water levels had risen so high that it had submerged part of a residential building. Northern China has seen record precipitation in recent years, exposing densely populated cities, including Beijing, to flood risks. Some scientists link the increased rainfall in China's usually arid north to global warming. The storms are part of the broader pattern of extreme weather across China due to the East Asian monsoon, which has caused disruptions in the world's second-largest economy. Xiwanzi Village in Shicheng Town, near Miyun Reservoir, was severely affected, CCTV said on Monday with an additional 100 villagers transferred to a primary school for shelter. It comes after the maximum flood peak flow into the Miyun reservoir reached a record high of 6550 cubic meters per second, Beijing authorities said on Sunday. In neighbouring Shanxi province, videos from state media showed roads inundated by strong gushing currents and submerged vegetation including crops and trees. In Beijing's Pinggu District, two high-risk road sections have been sealed, authorities said. Authorities are carrying out search and rescue work across cities including Datong, where a driver in a Ford car has lost contact while driving in the floods, the People's Daily reported. China's Water Resources Ministry has issued targeted flood warnings to 11 provinces and regions, including Beijing and neighbouring Hebei, for floods from small and midsize rivers and mountain torrents. Two were dead and two missing in Hebei province, CCTV said on Sunday morning. Overnight rain dumped a record 145 mm (5.7 inches) per hour on Fuping in the industrial city of Baoding. China's National Development and Reform Commission said on Monday that it was urgently arranging 50 million yuan ($6.98 million) to support Hebei. The funds would be used to repair damaged roads and bridges, water conservancy embankments, schools and hospitals in the disaster area. The NDRC said it was 'promoting the restoration of normal life and production as soon as possible.' Chinese authorities closely monitor extreme rainfall and severe flooding are, as they challenge the country's ageing flood defences, threaten to displace millions and wreak havoc on China's $2.8 trillion agricultural sector.
The Hindu
3 hours ago
- The Hindu
How is India preparing against GLOF events?
The story so far: On July 8, Nepal experienced a catastrophic Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF) event which caused a flash flood along the Lende river flowing from Tibet to Nepal, and washed away a China-built friendship bridge. The bridge had serviced the 10-year old inland container port at Rasuwagadhi in Rasuwa (north of Kathmandu). The catastrophe is also reported to have made four Nepalese hydro-power plants along the Bhote Koshi river unusable, obliterating 8% of the country's power supply. With rising temperatures and subsequent glacial melt, the increased risk of GLOFs is threatening life and property in the higher Himalayas. Do trans-boundary watersheds diminish possibilities of early warning? While Chinese authorities have as yet refrained from confirming the cause, most Nepalese scientists and officials confirmed a GLOF event in Tibet, where a supra-glacial lake had burst, diminishing its surface area to 43 hectares from 63 hectares a day before. Nepalese officials were quoted lamenting in local media that neither did the Chinese authorities provide an early warning, nor was there an established system of doing so, despite a recent increase in supra-glacial lakes on the Tibetan side. Hours later, on the same day, another GLOF event occurred at a moraine-dammed lake in the northern part of the Mustang district in Nepal (north-west of Kathmandu). Two months before, two glacial lakes in the Humla district (far-north corner of Nepal) had witnessed significant GLOF events, while in 2024, a GLOF in the Solukhumbu district had destroyed the Thame village in Nepal, the base camp for Mount Everest climbers. The need for trans-boundary collaborations in setting up early warning protocols seems paramount, given that Nepal has lost many lives and much infrastructure in successive GLOF events. Similar events have impacted Nepal regularly, including the GLOF in Cirenma Co, a glacial lake, in Tibet in 1981, which released 20 mcm of water raising the Bhote Koshi river by 30 metres. Several decades later the same lake was reported to have rejuvenated and was rated high-risk. Other significant events include the Digi Tsho GLOF event in 1985, and the Tama Pokhari GLOF event in 1998. In response, Nepal has conducted risk mitigation works on the Imja Tsho and Tsho Rolpa lakes by drawing down water levels through artificial channels, a challenging task at heights above 5,000 m, and has further plans to target half a dozen more at-risk glacial lakes. What is the nature of GLOF risk for India? As per India's National Remote Sensing Centre, the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) is home to 11 river basins and 28,000 glacial lakes. There are two prominent types of glacial lakes found in the IHR. The first are supraglacial lakes, formed in depressions on glaciers from meltwater, highly prone to melting in the summer months. The second are moraine-dammed lakes, formed by meltwater at the toe/snout of a glacier, dammed by loose debris or ice-cores, making them prone to sudden failure. Almost two-thirds of GLOF events are triggered by ice avalanches or landslides, and the remaining due to excessive meltwater pressure on weak moraine dams and earthquakes. With 2023 and 2024 being the hottest years on Earth, extreme temperatures in smaller geographies have been higher, thereby causing more glacial melt in certain pockets, making some glacial lakes highly risky. In addition to rising heat, is the problem of scale. 7,500 glacial lakes are situated in India, with most above 4,500 metres in height, hence approachable for surveys only during a short window in the summer season. There are almost no weather and water monitoring stations in these regions due to inaccessibility, lack of sustainability and cost, leaving this growing risk largely unmapped. The only credible means is measuring growth in surface area via remote sensing over periods of time, a measure which is post-facto and provides little by way of risk assessment or early warning of any sort. Additionally, vulnerability of the immediate geography is critical to determining the exact nature of risk. This includes damage to homesteads, livelihoods, biodiversity, bridges and hydro-power projects along rivers that relay GLOFs downstream. The South Lhonak GLOF in 2023 in Sikkim wiped out the $2 billion and 1250 MW generating Chungthang dam and also intensified the flash flood causing massive silting downstream. Since then, the Central Water Commission has found that the Teesta riverbed has risen several metres, significantly reducing its carrying capacity and increasing the chances of its banks overflowing. Besides the Sikkim GLOF, one of the most damaging events in recent times was the Chorabari GLOF in 2013, which turned into a cascading disaster accompanied by cloudbursts and landslides, known as the Kedarnath catastrophe — causing hundreds of casualties and billions in infrastructure damage. What can India do to mitigate GLOF risk? The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has markedly accelerated its efforts to manage these increasing risks. With respect to mitigation, it has initiated a proactive shift from mere post-disaster response to risk reduction through its Committee on Disaster Risk Reduction (CoDRR). This national coordination effort brought together related central scientific agencies, academic and research institutions, and States/UTs to study, monitor, warn, and mitigate GLOF risk in India. As a result, the central government finalised its first national programme of $20 million, prioritising 56 at-risk glacial lakes. The list has now been expanded to 195, categorised into four risk levels. Following the expected award of the 16th Finance Commission for the period FY2027 to FY2031, there are plans to scale up this programme, significantly. Objectives of this programme are five-fold — hazard assessment of each at-risk lake; installing Automated Weather and Water Stations (AWWS); establishing Early Warning Systems (EWS) downstream; mitigating risk by drawing down water levels or building flow through retention structures; and community engagement, an essential element of risk reduction. Under the programme, States where glacial lakes are resident were encouraged to take the lead in sending scientific expeditions to 40 of the highest at-risk lakes in the summer of 2024. One of the critical parameters in the exercise was to encourage Indian technology, systems and scientific expertise, one of which is the science of SAR interferometry — the art of analysing micro-changes in slope stability (upto a centimetre) using remote sensing satellite imagery as high as 10-metre resolution. The near-absence of usage of this scientific method to predict GLOFs and landslides is an identified gap that needs to be plugged through this programme. Another significant gap is the absence of well-resourced Indian foundations and innovative technology providers in the business of risk reduction in the Himalayan cryosphere. What is status of mitigation efforts? Several multi-institutional expeditions returned with success stories, across J&K, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh with a couple of light-hearted tales for their archives. One such expedition lost its way in bad weather, and another had to leave behind an expedition member in the village as security so that the rest of the expedition did not pollute the sacred lake by entering its holy waters. These episodes were evidence of the critical need for community engagement, to integrate the local community in expeditions and the need to convince residents of the credibility and sincerity of the exercise. The successful expeditions conducted bathymetry to assess the volume of water in the lakes; used Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) to understand the existence of ice-cores under moraine-dams, a key reason for dam breaks; and performed UAV and slope surveys of surrounding land/ice forms. Monitoring stations were installed at two lakes in Sikkim, which relay weather and water data every 10 minutes, with a daily dose of pictures of both ends of the lake and its shoreline. In subsequent summers, States will be installing more such systems, thereby overcoming an oft-repeated data-gap in the IHR cryosphere. In the absence of automated early warning mechanisms, Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) deployments in high reaches have been oriented towards the role of manual early warning. After the monsoon this year, States/UTs are gearing up for another round of expeditions. Safi Ahsan Rizvi is an IPS officer and adviser to the NDMA.
