Disasters and emergency response

Locals in Ben Tre Province are storing freshwater as saltwater intrudes into canals and rivers at levels higher than seen in previous years. Last weekend, Vo Thi Ngoc Anh, 50, a resident in Binh Dai District of Ben Tre, switched to bottled water for cooking instead ...

A dozen homes and adjacent fruit farms and fishponds were swept away into a river in Vinh Long Province recently, which is just another episode of destructive erosion in the Mekong Delta. Erosion swallowed up much of the banks of the Chien River on Monday afternoon, ...

any people will be familiar with the dread when your income no longer covers your expenses; when you’ve exhausted your savings and are sinking ever deeper into debt. In the Mekong Delta, a similar downward spiral is happening. But it’s not the delta’s finances that ...

HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM – At 63, Nguyen Thi Ngoc landed her first full-time ‘company’ job as a security guard in Ho Chi Minh City. She had never been to a city before taking the job in early 2021, but the former farmer from ...

Around 100 flood-resistant houses built in the Mekong Delta have not been used for two decades as upstream dams have disrupted the eagerly awaited flooding season. One afternoon in November, Nguyen Thi Diem, 32, and her husband took advantage of the sunny weather to fix the ...

Rice crops in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have taken a hit from flooding and conflict this year, casting a shadow on a mostly sunny outlook for Southeast Asia’s output of the key grain as the region deals with other potential longer term supply troubles, farm ...

Water levels along the Hau River, a Mekong branch, rose to 2.27 meters, breaking the 2019 record and plunging Can Tho City in chaos. Commuters drive through floodwaters on Nguyen Trai Street in Can Tho’s downtown district of Ninh Kieu at 9 p.m. on Wednesday. Tides on ...

As soon as the roads are widened a fresh glut of cars moves in to fill them, says lifelong Ho Chi Minh City resident Thinh Pham, who fears urban planning is forever condemned to lag behind the unrelenting growth of one of Southeast Asia’s most ...

“I remember seeing a buffalo, its head tied to a floating barrel, drifting down the river,” says Pheng Sisuwath, gesturing to the Sekong River from his stilt house in Cambodia’s northeastern province of Stung Treng. That was four years ago, when one of the auxiliary dams ...

Two major tributaries of the Mekong River have burst their banks, flooding about 4,000 rai of paddy fields in Sri Songkhram district of this northeastern province. The water level of the Mekong in Nakhon Phanom on Saturday was about 8 metres, or 4m below the spill-over ...