This happened last year as well and from what I can remember and also what I have been told, this is a regular occurrence for this part of the world. Perhaps that is why the coastline is shaped that way that it is.
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For the past few weeks that weather has been turning and it is always this time of year that we all start to wonder if it is the impending rainy season or if it is something a bit more ominous such as a typhoon.
I was here for a couple of bad ones in the past couple of years and basically it just means that we are going to be dealing with really strong winds that in the past has resulted in things blowing off the top of buildings. The rooftop of my own building used to have this quite nice looking thick glass as a barricade around the swimming pool, but last year's typhoon blew a few of those off the building and they crashed to the ground below. These pieces of glass are extremely heavy and I guess we are just very lucky that they didn't hit anyone because it would have almost certainly killed them.
The railing or barricade has now been replaced by a metallic barrier with very good air flow. There is no chance that is going to get blown down or if it did, we would be dealing with "end of the world" type winds and the state of the swimming pool wouldn't matter.
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The media is referring to it as a "super typhoon" and I don't know if that is an official term or just the media using their usual scare tactics to get people to go to their websites. Either way, the beach areas here in Da Nang and other central areas of Vietnam are already taking precautions.
The beachfront hotels and businesses have been taking down decorations and securing their almost exclusively windows lobbies with various tapes, pillows, or even some form of plywood which isn't really easy to come by in a country with very little useable timber.
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The city of Da Nang has been traveling around and trimming back trees quite a lot. To the point where it seems like they are killing the trees. It looks like hell but I suppose it is better than the branches falling and taking out the electricity or hurting someone.
For us normal people we are just hopeful that the internet will not switch off and Vietnam in the past has done a pretty good job to make sure this doesn't happen. We are all stocking up our fridges as well because as the first image indicates, this could last for several days and I wouldn't want to be out in the streets when the rain is coming in sideways. My building has a generator and I already put a bunch of movies on a USB stick in case things get broken.
I'm hopeful that nothing terrible will happen but I think that this part of the world is rather used to this sort of thing happening almost every year.