Typhoon Kalmaegi batters Vietnam

Fierce winds and torrential rains kill at least five, damage thousands of homes.

- BY ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL AND JIM GOMEZ

NHAC NGUYEN AFP/Getty Images A RESIDENT records damage done to a roof in the village of Nhon Hai in Vietnam's Gia Lai province.

Typhoon Kalmaegi brought fierce winds and torrential rains to Vietnam, killing at least five people, flattening homes, blowing off roofs and uprooting trees.

In the Philippines, where the storm left at least 204 dead last week, survivors wept over the coffins of their loved ones and braced for another typhoon.

As the storm moved on, recovery work began in battered towns and villages in both countries. Across central Vietnamese provinces, people cleared debris and repaired roofs on their homes.

Jimmy Abatayo, who lost his wife and nine close relatives after the typhoon unleashed flooding in the central Philippine province of Cebu, was overwhelmed with sorrow and guilt as he ran his palm over his wife’s casket.

"I was able to swim. I told my family to swim, 'You will be saved, just swim, be brave and keep swimming,'" said Abatayo, 53, pausing and then breaking into tears. "They did not hear what I said because I would never see them again."

In Cebu, 141 people died, mostly in flooding. Villagers on Friday gathered to say goodbye to their dead, including at a basketball gym turned funeral parlor where relatives wept before a row of white coffins bedecked with flowers and small portraits of the deceased.

A state of national emergency declared by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday was still effect in the Philippines as the country braced for another potentially powerful storm, Typhoon Fung-wong, known locally as Uwan.

Marcos, who visited Cebu on Friday, said an unusually large volume of rain overwhelmed dikes and flood-control safeguards and caused rivers to rapidly overflow on Tuesday, flooding nearby residential communities, where residents scrambled to climb to the upper floors or roofs of their houses in panic.