Flash floods kill 11 in northern Vietnam

Eleven people, three of them children, have been killed by flash floods and landslides that struck a mountainous province in northern Vietnam this week, the government said on Friday. Rescue workers were searching for bodies of five of the dead after seasonal heavy rains since Tuesday pounded several remote districts in Ha Giang province, Vietnam's northernmost province bordering China, the government report said. It is the second time this month flash floods have struck the province. In a previous disaster three weeks ago, 133 people were killed in flash floods and landslides in 11 northern provinces, including nine in Ha Giang.

The flood-hit area lies about 1,400 km (870 miles) north of Vietnam's coffee belt in the Central Highlands. Ha Giang is also outside Vietnam's main rice growing regions, namely the Red River Delta in the north and the Mekong Delta in the country's south. Rains are still expected in northern Vietnam that could trigger more floods and the government's disaster report said seasonal floods, now slowly receding in the Mekong Delta, were forecast to rise near the Alarm Two level following tidal waves by next Monday. Alarm-two level is a dangerous flood condition in which heavy flooding is expected, fast-flowing rivers may break their banks and destroy dykes and foundations of bridges are at risk. towns and cities remain protected by dykes, the government said. Floods are expected to bring little harm to Vietnam's summer rice crop in the Mekong Delta because most of the crop had been harvested. About 20 percent of Vietnam's 86.5 million people live in the Mekong Delta, which produces more than half of the country's paddy output and supplies more than 90 percent of its commercial rice.

The government said this week it has approved a program to spend $145 million between now and 2010 to build dykes and relocate 33,000 families of rice farmers from areas threatened by seasonal floodings in the Mekong river.

_{Bron: Reuters}