More rains to come after flooding in Vietnam and China leaves thousands homeless

More heavy rain is forecast in Vietnam and China today after at least 30 people were killed as homes were buried in landslides triggered by heavy rains.

More than 300,000 people had been forced to leave their homes, and up to 10m people were affected by the seasonal flooding, according to local TV reports.

In Vietnam, television showed many houses flooded to their roofs and warned of a "high" risk of more rains in the country’s poorest northern districts and its border with China. Landslides and floods cut off roads, telecommunications and power supply in some areas, and fields of rice, corn and cassava were damaged, a disaster report from the Vietnamese government said.

Vietnam is often struck by floods and storms between July and October but the government has said 47 people were dead or missing from natural disasters in the first half of this year.

On the Chinese side, flooding and heavy rain have forced 550,000 people to evacuate their homes and killed at least 15, China’s Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. Houses were toppled, roads flooded, and crops damaged in the Guangxi Zhuang region and the nearby provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi, China’s Xinhua news agency reported. In Liuzhou, the region's second largest city and an important transportation hub, water resources authorities called the flooding "the third biggest in history". "These rains always come and go here; there's only so much you can really do," Liu Junjie, a spokesman for Liuzhou's flood control and drought relief headquarters, told China Daily newspaper.

Today, rescue teams had managed to get through to some of Vietnam’s isolated communes in Bac Kan Province to look for victims and rebuild roads, Viet Nam news reported. Aid money had also been given out to families who have lost relatives.

Many more households will have will have to be moved to safer places. Nguyen Viet Cuong, deputy director of Ca Mau agricultural and rural development department said it had been able to help just 475 out of 2,300 households living in the most disaster prone areas move to safer places. The total number of households was much bigger, because the statistics did not include areas along the East Sea, Cuong added.

Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung today agreed to use a US$100- million loan from the World Bank to carry out the second stage of a poverty reduction project in the area which was hit.