Vietnam’s Year of Floods, Mud and Death
Publication on 11/27/2025

People in orange life vests wade through a brown, flooded street. Small boats and rafts carry others past buildings and street signs.

Scientists suggested that climate change could make central Vietnam a global hot spot for destructive storms. This year has seemed to prove the point.

Floodwaters besieged Nha Trang, Vietnam, last week.Credit...Duc Thao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Central Vietnam has become the latest epicenter of a deadly rainy season in Asia that has been supercharged by climate change, and seems to drag on without end.

More than 90 people in the nation have been killed in the past week from flooding and landslides, and around a dozen more are missing, government officials reported Sunday.

In one province, more than six feet of rain has fallen over the past few days. Peak coffee harvesting has been delayed. One government report noted that at least 200,000 homes have been flooded from the weekend’s heavy rains.

VideoVietnam Reels From Deadly Rainy Season
Cleanup efforts are underway in Vietnam, where government officials on Sunday said more than 90 people had been killed from flooding and landslides in the past week.CreditCredit...Nguyen Huy Thanh/Vietnam News Agency, via Associated Press
A line of people wearing rain gear, life vests and hats wades through muddy floodwaters, carrying blue plastic bags and cardboard boxes of supplies.
Residents carrying food after a spate of heavy rain in Hoi An in October.Credit...Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“It’s never happened like this before,” said Dao Dang Cong Trung, 44, the leader of a small rescue team from Hoi An who took his speedboat to the most damaged areas. “Local residents told me the floodwater rose too fast and they didn’t have time to do anything, so the damage is severe to their houses and many people died.”

Vietnam has been hit by 14 typhoons this year. Five was the average a few decades ago. The rain from the past few days did not even come from a cyclone — but to add inundation on top of injury, a 15th major storm has just formed off the country’s south central coast.

Images of this year’s relentless battering — of thick, soupy brown water sloshing over homes, shops, coffee plantations, tourist hotels and family tombs — have become both ubiquitous and disorienting. They can be hard to place in time, for many, because even as the rainy season is supposed to fade (as of this month), the floods have spread.


A green landscape features numerous palm trees heavily bent by strong winds. A red-arch and three white statues line a paved path.
Strong winds bent trees ahead of Typhoon Kalmaegi’s landfall in Gia Lai Province in early November.Credit...Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A person on a bicycle navigates a flooded street, passing beneath a large fallen tree trunk. Green leaves are strewn across the road.
Fallen trees blocked a road in Nghe An Province after Typhoon Kajiki hit in August.Credit...Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Central Vietnam has been the hardest hit, from around Da Nang last month to more than 300 miles south, near Nha Trang, where the suffering is concentrated now.

But Ho Chi Minh City flooded in August and again in early November. Hanoi was underwater last month, in a two-week period when three typhoons hit Vietnam. The rivers around Hue, a onetime royal capital, rose by 17 feet during a wet stretch of October, carrying muck into carefully restored historic buildings.

Frequent wars and hardship, along with a forward-looking culture, have made the Vietnamese people extremely resilient. Standing on tables to stay dry and pushing motorbikes through sludge, few have complained or assigned blame.

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A child on a scooter rides through deep floodwaters, splashing water.
A motorbike powers through a flooded in Ho Chi Minh City street earlier this month.Credit...Thanh Hue/Getty Images

A group of people lifts a decorative wooden coffin, wrapped in clear plastic, from a truck. They are on muddy ground; one person wears a bright green poncho.
Unloading a coffin ahead of a funeral for a flood victim in Hoa Thinh commune, Dak Lak Province, Vietnam, last week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Donors in drier areas have been quick to mobilize. In Ho Chi Minh City, metro stations became collection sites Sunday for mountains of food and clothing to help those farther north.

Online and in private, however, some Vietnamese have begun to criticize the government’s lack of preparedness and slow response. Natural disasters have left nearly 300 people dead or missing in Vietnam and caused more than $2 billion in damage between January and October, according to the national statistics office.

Why, many ask, aren’t alarm and evacuation systems providing more help to residents as rivers rise? Why aren’t mitigation systems stronger, guiding water away from population centers?

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Muddy floodwaters submerge a street in front of yellow buildings. A person in a green rain jacket wades through the waist-deep water.
A man wading through a flooded street in Hoi An in October.Credit...Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

People sit at a round metal table, eating from bowls, next to a stream of brown floodwater. A boat is visible in the distance.
A family having lunch inside a flooded house in Trieu Son Trung, a village in Hue, Vietnam, early this month.Credit...Thanh Hue/Getty Images

Huynh Ngoc Phuong, 51, said the discharge from dozens of reservoirs for irrigation and hydropower seemed to contribute to the flooding.

To save his family from waters that rose by three feet in 20 minutes on the night of Nov. 19, he said he had to punch a hole in the roof of his home in the central province of Khanh Hoa. One of his children almost drowned. At least three of his neighbors were killed.

“The whole village is destroyed — trash, TVs, fridges and mud are everywhere,” he said in an interview Monday after the waters receded but government aid had still yet to arrive. “Everyone was turned upside down. I don’t know where and how to begin to start life again.”

Officials say the government is investing in advanced weather forecasting and alert systems.

Climate scientists stress that Vietnam — along with many other nations — needs to move faster to get ahead of rapid change caused by global warming.


Multiple vehicles sit partially submerged on a street flooded with brown water. A person wearing a blue outfit stands in the water, below a busy elevated road.
Inundated vehicles sit in muddy water in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in November.Credit...Duc Thao/Agence France-Presse — Getty 

A person in a blue checkered shirt stands in muddy brown floodwater, stirring a pot on a portable gas stove.
Floodwaters in a house in Trieu Son Trung.Credit...Thanh Hue/Getty Images

The old standards, for rain, storms or how high rivers will rise, no longer fit an era when research shows that once-in-a-century extremes can happen far more often than that.

Geographically, Vietnam is especially vulnerable. A 2024 study identified it as a climate change “hot spot,” showing that warming temperatures adding moisture to the atmosphere and heating up the South China Sea would combine with typhoon patterns to create a vortex of risk.

“We wrote that in 2024, thinking it would be something that would play out over the next few decades, not the next 12 months,” said Benjamin P. Horton, Dean of the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong, and a co-author of the report.

“You’d expect rain anyhow, but it’s becoming more extreme,” he added. “When you have natural variation, when it should be wetter, climate change takes it to the next level.”

Mr. Trung, the rescuer with the boat, said he was still trying to process the disasters that no longer seem natural.

“I didn’t know what to feel,” he said. “I tried to rescue as many as I could. But there were many that I was not able to help.”


An aerial view of a town, its buildings and streets immersed in muddy brown floodwaters. A wide river flows under an overcast sky.
A partially submerged corner of Hoi An in October. Credit...Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Source Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/world/asia/vietnam-flooding-typhoon-emergency.html