Typhoon Kalmaegi raged across Vietnam on Friday, claiming five more lives after its devastating passage through the Philippines saw 188 people killed.
Kalmaegi unleashed record rainfall and flooding in the central Philippines this week – sweeping away cars, trucks and shipping containers before lashing Vietnam overnight.
“The roof of my house was just blown away,” said Nguyen Van Tam, a 42-year-old fisherman in Vietnam’s Gia Lai province, where the storm made landfall packing sustained winds of up to 92mph, according to the environment ministry.
“We were all safe, (but) the typhoon was really terrible, so many trees fallen,” he said, adding that his boat had survived.
A house destroyed by Typhoon Kalmaegi in Phu My, Gia Lai Province, central Vietnam – Shutterstock
A damaged building blocks a road in Dak Lak after Typhoon Kalmaegi lashed Vietnam – Hau Dinh/AP
People eat at a street-side restaurant surrounded by floodwaters in Ho Chi Minh City – Thanh Hue/Getty Images
Vietnamese authorities were still assessing the damage on Friday morning, but the environment ministry reported five dead, and 57 houses collapsed in Gia Lai and neighbouring Dak Lak.
Nearly 3,000 more had their roofs blown off or were damaged, it said, while 11 boats or ships sank.
The state power company said 1.6 million clients lost electricity as the typhoon smashed the central coast, but service to a third of them had been restored by Friday morning.
Vietnam is in one of the most active tropical cyclone regions on Earth and is typically affected by 10 typhoons or storms a year, but Kalmaegi was the 13th of 2025.
Fast-moving Kalmaegi has already swept north-west toward Laos and is forecast to hit Thailand, which issued a warning on Friday for heavy rainfall and flooding starting in the north-east but spreading to the rest of the country.
Kalmaegi had initially hit the islands of Cebu and Negros in the Philippines before swooping back out to sea.
Floodwaters described as unprecedented rushed through the hardest hit Cebu province’s towns and cities, where the hunt for missing people continues.
Philippines authorities raised the death toll to 188, with 135 still missing.
The typhoon hit central Vietnam as it was still reeling from more than a week of flooding and record rains that killed at least 47 people and submerged centuries-old historic sites.
The heavy rains starting in late October had drenched the former imperial capital Hue and the ancient town of Hoi An, both Unesco-listed sites, turning streets into canals and flooding tens of thousands of homes.
Up to 1.7m (5ft 6in) fell over one 24-hour period in a downpour breaking national records.
With nearly 2,000 miles of coastline and a network of 2,300 rivers, Vietnam faces a high risk of flooding.
