Sunday, April 8, 2012

Typhoon Pakhar!!

Last Sunday, a severe storm, Pakhar, hit South Vietnam. I didn't know how bad the storm was until I rode around town the next morning. The storm started out as a typhoon in the South China Sea last Thursday, but luckily it degraded into a tropical storm when it hit South Vietnam. Nevertheless, it still caused great damage, upending hundreds of trees across the city, tearing the concrete ground with them, and damaging about 700 homes as well as creating floods and landslides. Unfortunately, two people perished because of it. 

A student from my adult English class told me that this was the worse storm in Vietnam since the 1940s. Another student rebutted and said since the 80s. Yet a source online tells me that in the last 100 years, there had only been 3 other storms: 1904, 1996 (Ernie), 2006 (Durian). Also, I could not find the meaning or origin of the word Pakhar, and the only results that Google yielded were the storm itself... So perhaps the name was coined just for this storm?



  

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