Scores die in worst Mekong flooding since 2000

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1 of 5. Rescuers stand on a broken dyke of the Mekong river in An Giang province, Vietnam September 28, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Van Duc/Tuoi Tre Newspaper

By Prak Chan Thul

PHNOM PENH | Fri Sep 30, 2011 8:41am EDT

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - At least 150 people in Cambodia and southern Vietnam have died in the worst flooding along the Mekong River in 11 years after heavy rain swamped homes, washed away bridges and forced thousands of people to evacuate.

Worse could be in store if Typhoon Nesat, which killed at least 39 people in China this week and plowed into northern Vietnam on Friday, dumps rain deep enough inland to further swell the Mekong.

Flooding across the fertile Mekong Delta helped drive rice prices to a three-year high in Vietnam this week, traders said, which will add to inflation problems. The delta produces more than half of Vietnam's rice and 90 percent of its exportable grain.

In Cambodia, 141 people have died since August 13 due to Mekong flooding and flash floods, the Cambodian National Disaster Management Committee said.

"Now, more than 200,000 hectares (494,200 acres) of our rice paddies are under water but we don't yet know the full extent of the damage," said Keo Vy, deputy information director at the National Disaster Management Committee.

Cambodia is a minor rice exporter, but Vietnam is the world's second-biggest exporter behind Thailand.

In 2000, the worst flooding in decades killed more than 480 people across the Delta region. The following year, more than 300 people died when the Mekong, which flows 4,350 km (2,700 miles) from the glaciers of Tibet to the rice-rich Delta of southern Vietnam, overflowed its banks.

Some 150,000 families had been affected by the flooding in Cambodia this year and another 15,000 evacuated to higher ground, said Men Neary Sopheak, deputy secretary general of Cambodia's Red Cross.

Down river in Vietnam, at least nine people have died since seasonal floods arrived in the Delta in August, government and provincial disaster reports said. Floods had inundated nearly 3,800 houses and nearly 700 people were evacuated in An Giang province and the city of Can Tho.

Dykes and bridges were washed away in places and roads submerged by the muddy deluge. Production of shrimp and fish had been affected in parts of the Delta.

PEAK OF FLOODING NEAR?

Flooding is forecast to peak in Vietnam in early October. The waters had already peaked in Cambodia and were receding there slowly, the Vietnamese government said on Friday.

Water had reached 4.76 metres (15 ft 7 in) early on Friday at Vietnam's Tan Chau gauging station, 0.26 meter (10 in) above Alarm Level Three, the most dangerous flood condition at which inundation is widespread and dykes are in jeopardy.

It was forecast to peak at 4.9 metres (16 ft) by Sunday, the government said. Water 5 metres deep can submerge one-storey houses, which are common in the Delta in southern Vietnam.

Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai urged the provincial authorities to evacuate people from dangerous areas, speed up the rice harvest and close more schools to prevent deaths.

Around 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres) of the Delta's third rice crop have been inundated as floods broke through dyke sections in the provinces of Dong Thap and An Giang, and another 90,000 hectares (22,240 acres) were under threat.

The region has planted nearly 600,000 hectares (1.58 million acres) for the current crop, which is mainly for domestic consumption, and only 5 percent has been harvested, the agriculture ministry said.

In Thailand, the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation said 180 people had died in flooding since mid-July caused by tropical storm Nock-Ten and seasonal monsoons.

Two million people in 23 provinces have been affected, with 2.4 million acres of farmland under water. Officials say rice has been harvested early in some areas, which may cut yields.

Flooding was reported in the night bazaar in the northern town of Chiang Mai, popular with tourists, and flash floods and landslides were reported in areas around town due to the high level of the Ping river, officials said.

(Additional reporting by Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi and Jutarat Skulpichetrat in Bangkok; Writing by John Ruwitch; Editing by Alan Raybould and Sanjeev Miglani)

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America marks ten years since 9/11.

NEW YORK - Americans gather Sunday to pray at cathedrals in their cities and to wear roses before positions of fire in their smaller cities, remembering the worst terrorist attacks on American soil.

Around the world, many others will do something similar as so changed for them that day, too.

Ten years arrived from 3 000 were killed at the hands of a global terror network terrorists crashed planes diverted in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a fourth plane crashed in a field in rural Western Pennsylvania.

Sunday, church bells will toll. Americans will see new memorials at the bottom of Manhattan, rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere, symbols of a determination to retain and to rebuild.

But much of the weight of the ceremonies of this year lies in what is largely implied. The role of the anniversary is in prompting Americans to examine how affected attacks them and the rest of the world and the prosecution are trying to include 9/11 place in the history of the nation.

""Many of the passwords in the background,"said Ken Foote, author of" shadowed ground: landscapes of Violence and tragedy, America "examines the role the veneration of the sites of the death and disaster in modern life.".These anniversaries are particularly critical in what story to tell, that this all ways to find. It requires people to understand what happened to us. »

Saturday in the West of rural Pennsylvania, more than 4000 people have begun to tell the story again.

At the inauguration of the National Memorial to Flight 93 near the town of Shanksville, former Presidents George w. Bush and Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden joined the families of the 40 passengers and crewmembers aboard the Jet that counter against the hijackers.

"The time where American democracy was attacked that our citizens challenging their captors by organizing a vote", Bush said. Their choice the cost of their lives.

Passengers and crew gave "across the country countless gift: they saved the Capitol of attack," an amount countless lives and denied al-Qaida the symbolic victory of the "smashing the Centre of the US Government", said Clinton.

They were "ordinary people given no time to decide and they did the right thing", he said.

"And 2 500 years, I hope and pray to God that people will still remember this.".

The Memorial Park in Pennsylvania is age of completion. But the consecration and a service to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks are the essential milestones, said Sally Ware, one of the volunteers "ambassadors" who works as a guide on the site since the disaster.

Ware, whose home was rocked when the aircraft crashed two miles away, recalled how hundreds of people flocked to the site in the days later to leave their own memories and memorials. She started volunteering after finding an along the road - a red rose placed at the top of the uniform of the edge.

"It really annoyed me.". "I thought that someone has to deal with this," said Ware, whose daughter is flight attendant.

Now, a decade later, she said that the Memorial can do little to relieve the pain of the families of those who died in the accident.

But the weekend ceremonies reminds me of a story with a much broader scope. Ceremonies to honor those who "fought the first battle against terrorism, and they have won," Ware said. "It is one thing, I don't want to miss." It became a part of my life. »

Sunday, the focus turns to ceremonies in the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C. and in lower Manhattan for the inauguration of the Memorial on 11 September. President Barack Obama planned to attend events on sites and was to speak to a service on Sunday evening at the Kennedy Center.

The New York ceremony begins at 08: 30, with a moment of silence 16 minutes later - which coincides with the exact time when the first tower of the trade center was hit by a hijacked plane.

And then, one by one, the reading of the names of the 2 977 killed September 11 in New York, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.

And therefore arrived one Sunday dedicated to remembrance, with hundreds of ceremonies across the country and around the world: for a memorial mass at the Cathedral of St. Patrick in New York in a ceremony featuring nine-stories-tall replica of the twin towers on an esplanade in Paris.

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