As the Mekong delta washes away, homes and highways are being lost
One night two years ago, Lam Thi Le and Nguyen Van Thuong heard loud cracks coming from their neighbours’ riverfront home. The neighbours left, and a day later half of their house collapsed into the broad Tien River as the land beneath it slid away.
The shell of the remaining half sits precariously on the jagged river bank. Le and Thuong live a few metres inland. Nearby, workers use a machine to pack rocks onto the riverbank, laying the foundation for a concrete embankment designed to prevent further erosion.
This community in Vietnam’s Dong Thap province is not unique. The Tien is one of the Mekong River’s main branches flowing down from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh. In recent years, dams built upstream in China, Laos and Cambodia and local sand mining have starved delta provinces such as Dong Thap of sediment, causing once-stable land to erode.
Michael Tatarski
