Death Toll Reaches 39 as Floods Spread in Vietnam

The worst floods in decades in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta have spread to three more provinces in the region as the death toll from the deluge rose to at least 39, officials said Wednesday.

Fed by the swollen Mekong River in Cambodia and fresh monsoon rains, flood levels in the worst-hit provinces of An Giang, Long An and Dong Thap bordering Cambodia rose at least another inch overnight, provincial officials said.

A Vietnamese Red Cross official in An Giang said the floods have spread to the provinces of Can Tho, Kien Giang and Tien Giang and threatened areas farther downstream toward the coast.

Eighteen people have been reported killed in An Giang, 14 in Dong Thap and seven in Long An. Most of the victims were children.

The capitals of all three provinces were flooded, and little travel by road was possible.

John Geoghegan, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, or IFRC, in Vietnam, said he expected water levels to keep rising for the rest of the month.

Vietnamese meteorologists have also warned that month-end high tides in the South China Sea could prevent flood waters from draining out to sea from the delta.

The floods have turned vast areas of the three worst-hit delta provinces into desolate inland seas, and the IFRC and other international and local aid agencies have been assisting hundreds of thousands of affected people.

The IFRC estimates that more than half a million homes have been flooded and that up to 150,000 people have been forced to flee to earthen dikes, many of which are crumbling, threatening greater casualties.

Most evacuees have had to abandon meager possessions and rice reserves. Living conditions are cramped and squalid, and the evacuees are short of food and fresh water.

Although water levels have already surpassed those of the last serious floods to hit the delta, in 1996--which killed 217 people--swift rescue work by thousands of soldiers and volunteers and better flood defenses have helped limit deaths so far.

In Cambodia, where floods have claimed nearly 120 lives and caused more than $50 million in damage to property alone, officials said that the worst was over and that the waters were receding.

“The water of the Mekong River is going down, and there is no sign that the water can threaten the country anymore,” Te Navuth, director of the hydrology department of the Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology, said Wednesday.