Northern province Yên Bái held urgent meeting at night on overcoming typhoon Yagi’s consequences

Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Đỗ Đức Duy (standing) gives instruction at the urgent meeting at night in Yên Bái Province. — VNA/VNS Photo Tuấn Anh

YÊN BÁI — Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Đỗ Đức Duy chaired an urgent meeting in the northern mountainous province of Yên Bái to improve the handling of consequences of powerful typhoon Yagi.

At the meeting, Minister Duy highly appreciated the province’s disaster response.

The province has proactively had many creative ways, although the damage was severe, it has minimised losses.

It has directed the rescue well with many professional forces participated in, demonstrating professionalism and timely support for the people.

Good education has created a good social effect, many relief groups across the country have joined in to support local people.

However, there are still many problems such as lacking arrangement for boats to transport patients to medical facilities, not creative while controlling traffic, the transportation sector has not actively participated in reasonable traffic flow direction.

Duy emphasised that on Wednesday, the province needs to expand the recovery and support to Trấn Yên and Lục Yên districts.

Some unfinished tasks must be implemented immediately. The province must promptly learn from past tasks that have not been done well and do them more professionally and systematically.

The province must be determined to do a good job in search and rescue for those who are still missing and trapped.

Other important works are evacuating people to safe zones, paying special attention to social security, focusing on families with dead, injured, isolated people and providing logistical support for households facing difficulties.

He also said that Yên Bái Province must give care to infrastructure restoration and do a good job on damage statistics.

It should review and arrange reasonable working groups to the grassroots to give instruction in overcoming the typhoon’s consequences.

And it must review landslide sites, pay immediate attention to the reasonable resettlement land for people in damaged areas.

In particular, for Yên Bái City, the province should keep close watch on landslides and receding water points, have a plan to handle, clean up the environment, and provide clean water for people.

The electricity sector must prioritise providing electricity to the provincial general hospital, Trấn Yên District and Yên Bái City where the water recedes.

The agricultural sector should survey clean water issues, review irrigation works to have early plans to restore agricultural production.

The health sector needs to have optimal plans for medical examination and treatment.

The transport sector needs to care about surveying traffic flow, ensuring smooth traffic to localities; reasonably allocate boats and generators to localities that are still lacking.

Specialised agencies need to grasp the people’s thoughts and aspirations, having general direction to press agencies to work effectively.

At the meeting, Trần Huy Tuấn, Chairman of the provincial People's Committee affirmed that as soon as typhoon Yagi occurred in Yên Bái Province, many solutions were realised, especially directing localities to have appropriate and practical plans to minimise the consequences and support people to limit damage caused by the typhoon.

The committee will continue to direct localities to review the losses so that support and rescue work is close to reality.

As of 5pm on Tuesday, the province recorded 40 dead and missing people, of which 36 died due to landslides.

Of these, Yên Bái City had 20 people, Lục Yên District had 10 people, Văn Yên District had four people, and Trấn Yên and Văn Chấn districts each had one person.

The whole province had over 22,000 damaged houses; nearly 18,700 flooded houses, of which over 12,000 were in Yên Bái City, nearly 4,000 houses in Trấn Yên District, Lục Yên and Văn Yên districts had over 1,000 houses.

In the agricultural sector, over 4,000ha of crops were damaged and affected. Nearly 2,000 livestock and poultry died, over 100ha of fish ponds were washed away, and some sturgeon farms were affected.

Regarding traffic infrastructure, landslides on slopes occurred in 96 locations. Many flooded areas caused traffic jams.

Many public works, medical facilities and schools were isolated.

In addition, there were great damages to electricity and communication.

Estimated damage is about VNĐ195 billion (US$7.9 million). — VNS