The last few days have been a whirlwind….in the literal sense! Hurricane Yagi hit Hanoi straight on and it was a pretty intense adventure! Winds were as high as 100km an hour in the capital (even worse on the coast!) and 9 people died in the storm in Vietnam. Several hundred were injured. Being here through it was a little nerve wracking so I thought I’d take a minute to share the experience with my readers.
Friday Afternoon
We knew the typhoon was supposed to hit Hanoi in the middle of the night on Friday. So, we did our shopping Thursday night to be safe, charged our batteries, and collected all the lanterns and flashlights in our apartment so they’d be easy to find.
Friday afternoon, I was at school, when suddenly it got very dark and very windy….about 12 hours ahead of schedule. I assumed the storm just got to us earlier than expected, so I packed up my things and head for home. The weather was already pretty bad by the time I made it onto the road, but I figured it was only going to get worse from there, so I risked it.
The drive was horrendous. It took me 2 hours to drive 19kms. Luckily, the rain stopped about 20 minutes into the drive, but the streets were flooded and there was plenty of debris on the road making traffic worse than it already usually is. And of course, the human factor played into the situation as well. Everyone was in a rush to get home, and as a result, there was a lot of honking, a lot of near-accidents and a endless traffic jams caused by people running lights. By the time I got into my apartment, I was shaking from the stress of it all.
The rain stayed away the rest of the evening, and we learned that the storm I drove through wasn’t actually part of the typhoon itself…just a pre-curser to the main event. Still…it did some damage and it was VERY intense! Here is a video of how bad the wind got in that part of the storm. Again, it wasn’t this bad where I was, but I was definitely moving VERY slowly on my motorbike because the wind was extreme.
There was a weird feeling in the city that night. People were out and about, talking about the incoming storm, grabbing a few drinks and watching the skies. We got home from cocktails with some friends at about 1am and head for bed. When we woke up…the big storm had arrived.
Saturday
When I woke up, the storm didn’t sound too bad. We live in a small building that sits between two bigger buildings, so we couldn’t really tell how bad the storm really was. We still had power, and no water was coming in, so we figured things probably weren’t going to be as bad as predicted. Then we started hearing banging…and snapping…and howling…
We watched the wind rip our neighbour’s tin roof apart strip by strip. We heard trees falling in the distance. All over social media, we were hearing about power outages and flooding in people’s apartments. There were rumours that the city was going to shut down the whole city’s power at 7pm to prevent fires from breaking out, so we quickly prepared dinner, expecting the worst. The power cuts never happened.
We stayed inside the whole day, not daring to leave the safety of our sturdy little building. Still, when I laid down for a mid-typhoon nap Saturday afternoon, I could feel the building shake a bit from the safety of my bed.
At around 8 or 9pm, the eye of the storm passed over Hanoi. It got eerily calm. The rain continued lightly but the wind was much better than it had been. Then, as we expected, the wind started up again once the eye passed. Luckily for us, things got better from that point. After the eye passes you, the wind changes directions. That meant that our neighbour’s roof was left alone, and we were no longer worried about metal flying through any of our windows. The only casualty in our house was one of the trees on our front balcony. It’s fine…but it did take a tumble.
Sunday
Today, city workers started the long process of cleaning up. We head out at 9am to find some breakfast (the storm was gone at this point), and we were shocked by the devastation. Trees were turn right out of the concrete, fences and roofs lay scattered on the sidewalks (presumably having been moved off the road earlier in the morning). We saw one shop that was tilted to the left because a tree was uprooted right in front of it, and the roots nearly toppled the whole structure. There were cranes out, moving the bigger trees off of people’s houses and fences. The damage was baffling.
I made a couple of videos to show you what it looked like in our neighbourhood this morning.
Somehow, we never lost power. Right down our little alley, several power lines were damaged by trees, but our building never lost electricity. It’s funny the way storms can work.
So, Yagi was one heck of a ride! We were VERY lucky. Other than a bit of a leaky window and our plant falling over, we were unscathed. My drive home was by far the scariest part of the entire ordeal and the only time I ever felt like I was legitimately in danger (and I was more worried about the drivers on the road than anything else).
There are supposed to be another couple of storms coming, and it’ll be raining on and off all week as Yagi continues to dissipate and move inland, but for now, that’s all from me!