HA LONG, Vietnam: Typhoon Yagi weakened to a tropical depression on Sunday, after killing more than a dozen people, tearing roofs off buildings, sinking boats and triggering landslides across Vietnam.
The typhoon had left a trail of destruction and two dozen people dead across southern China and the Philippines before it ravaged Vietnam.
The storm killed 21 people and injured 229 in Vietnam, state media reported late Sunday.
Among the victims was a family of four killed after heavy rain caused a hillside to collapse onto a house in the mountainous Hoa Binh province of northern Vietnam, according to state media.
Since Friday, others have been killed in storm-related incidents, some crushed by falling trees or drifting boats, the defence ministry´s disaster management agency.
On Sunday afternoon, six people, including a newborn baby and a one-year-old boy, were killed in a landslide in the Hoang Lien Son mountains of northwestern Vietnam. The slide was triggered by heavy rains and high winds after Yagi made landfall on Saturday.
“We found the six bodies, including a one-year-old boy and a newborn, in the landslide,” a local official from the Sapa people´s committee, who asked not to be named, told AFP.
While Vietnam´s weather agency downgraded the storm on Sunday, several areas of the port city of Hai Phong were under half a metre of flood waters, and electricity was out, with power lines and electric poles damaged, according to AFP journalists.