Typhoon Damrey smashes into Vietnam

HANOI - Typhoon Damrey smashed into Vietnam on Tuesday after killing nine people in China, tearing up swathes of coastline from which more than 300,000 people were evacuated in advance, officials and state media said.

Prime Minister Phan Van Khai ordered that only young people, police and soldiers should remain behind to watch vital networks of dykes built to keep the sea out of rice fields.

"The waves are high, rising across the dyke now," Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat told state-run Vietnam Television from the northern province of Nam Dinh.

The sea dykes were built to withstand strong gales, but Damrey -- Khmer for elephant -- was spawning winds of 133km/h as it came ashore in Thanh Hoa province early on Tuesday, causing a blackout there and forecasters said worse was to come.

It tore up trees, electricity poles and lashed dykes reinforced by small armies of people in advance.

However, the greatest fear was of big sea surges as the arrival of the strongest storm to hit China's Hainan island in 30 years coincided with high tides.

State forecasters said they feared surges of up to 5.5m -- nearly the height of a fisherman's two-storey house -- would slam six northern and central Vietnamese provinces. Flash floods and landslides were other possibilities.

"The peak of the tides will come at around 11am," or 1600 NZT, Bui Van Khoi, an official in Nam Dinh's Giao Thuy district, told Reuters.

The typhoon made landfall in Giao Thuy, 130km southeast of Hanoi, said Lieutenant-General Hoang Ky, who commands a military unit protecting the sea dykes in Nam Dinh.

The combination of high tide and sea surges threatened the dykes, Ky told Vietnam Television.

Such fears prompted the mass evacuation by trucks and Russian-made buses from vulnerable coasts to solid buildings, like schools, well before Damrey stomped ashore and headed inland.

However, traders said the typhoon has missed the Central Highlands coffee belt, which lies further to the south. Vietnam is the world's second-biggest coffee producer after Brazil.

Thailand also issued flash flood warnings for the north and northeast, which forecasters said could expect three days of heavy rain until the typhoon petered out.

When it ploughed across Hainan, the southern Chinese island, Damrey's winds were gusting up to 180km/h, forcing the evacuation of more than 210,000 people and causing large-scale blackouts as well as killing nine people.

Major power grids could be fixed in two to three days, but to repair the whole network would take a month, the official Xinhua news agency quoted Hainan official Wang Yixin as saying.

Most of the people died as buildings collapsed or were killed by trees felled by heavy winds on the island often referred as China's Hawaii, domestic media said.

Sea water soaked low-lying areas and crops of tropical fruit and rice were damaged or flooded, contributing to economic losses from the storm estimated at 10 billion yuan ($1.76 billion), the China Daily said.

"The sea water reached the knees of some of my first-floor neighbours and their furniture was soaked," the newspaper quoted a resident of the provincial capital, Haikou, as saying.

In nearby Guangdong province, the economic powerhouse that borders Hong Kong, flights were delayed or cancelled from the capital, Guangzhou, and the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, leaving thousands stranded.

Typhoons, which frequently hit Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and southern China throughout the summer and autumn, gather strength from warm sea water and tend to dissipate after making landfall.

- REUTERS