When everyone was prepping for the impact of the typhoon I couldn't help but get a little annoyed. This is a sensation that I feel every time that the media gets people all worked up into believing that their lives and property are in danger because it seems, like a typhoon, to be cyclical. In the past 2.5 years the media has been getting people whipped into near-panic anytime anything remotely dangerous is going to happen and this time around, it was a serious overreaction on the part of the public.
For more than a day before the typhoon was even here, businesses were closing and boarding up their windows, people were reinforcing their property with sandbags, and of course everyone was putting those stupid tape crosses on their windows even though that process has been proven time and time again to accomplish almost nothing other than to leave tape goop on the windows after the storm has passed.
Just a few hours after the storm passed this is what most streets looked like. There is almost no damage aside from a tree limb here and there that fell down and the locals took it upon themselves to organize the branches and leaves into nicely arranged piles that I guess will be picked up by the sanitation technicians.
There were a few trees that fell down, but as far as I have seen, none of this resulted in any sort of real damage. Plus all of the trees that I have seen that fell were ones that were transplanted poorly and the roots had not yet had a chance to cling to the earth below properly. Losing a few branches, well, that is just part of the life of a tree now isn't it?
I guess you could say that I find it a bit annoying that people are so easily turned into panicky zombies just because the news and by extension, the government tells them that they should do so. The whole city of Da Nang had an 8pm curfew and building owners went and made rather silly contraptions to protect their lobbies. My own lobby was particularly silly
I'd like to believe that there is some science behind this, but honestly, I doubt that there is. That entire room is made of glass but the only thing where some sort of reinforcement was done was on the door using just whatever materials they could find. It would later be discovered, as the typhoon basically lost all of its strength upon hitting land, that all of this was done for no reason.
Traveling around my local area the day after the storm - 90% of which I slept through, I did find a sign here and there that had been blown down but that was about it. In Vietnam there aren't really any regulations about how a sign needs to be affixed to a building, so most of these were probably just thrown up in a haphazard manner to begin with. It isn't a surprise when things like this fall down because they weren't constructed with any sort of longevity in mind to begin with.
Overall, at least in Da Nang, there is virtually no damage at all and here we are less than 24 hours later and the traffic and construction noise is back, and all of the restaurants are open blasting their music at entirely too loud volumes.
I suppose I should consider yesterday a godsend because at least for one day, the city was quiet and that almost never happens.