Attachments
Authors: Andrea Ortiz Vargas and Zita Sebesvari
1. Event
From the beginning of October to mid-November 2020, Central Viet Nam was hit by nine consecutive high magnitude storms and typhoons (DMPTC, 2021; UNICEF, 2020). Typhoon Linfa, Typhoon Nangka, a tropical depression in the East Sea (also called Storm Ofel in some event reports), Typhoon Saudel, Typhoon Molave, Super Typhoon Goni, Storm Astani, Typhoon Etau and Typhoon Vamco caused heavy rains, strong winds, storm surges, widespread flooding and, in some instances, deadly landslides across ten provinces in the central region1 (DMPTC, 2021; van Tien and others, 2021a and 2021b; Office of United Nations Resident Coordinator, 2020c).
The nine storms and typhoons caused high waves and surges, together with high wind speeds and intense and continuous rainfall (Office of United Nations Resident Coordinator, 2020a, 2020b and 2020c). The continuous torrential rain left insufficient time for the water to infiltrate or drain, causing riverine floods, flash floods and in some areas also landslides (Office of United Nations Resident Coordinator, 2020c; IFRC, 2020b; VRC, 2020; World Bank, 2020). As this happened repeatedly in a short time frame of only seven weeks, new historic high levels were recorded in rivers including the Hieu (Quang Tri Province), Bo (Thuan Thien Hue Province), Gianh and Kien Giang (Quang Binh Province) in some affected areas (IFRC, 2021; World Bank, 2020).
When different hazards that might not always be extreme events individually manifest or co-occur in the same space and time, they can exacerbate the impacts and event duration, extent and damage, resulting in a compound event requiring different types of and integrated responses (Zscheischler and others, 2018; Sadegh and others, 2018; Mehran and others, 2017). This happened in Central Viet Nam, as the series of storms, typhoons and consequent different floods co-occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic and the situation developed into a compound event