Floating houses saved lives during floods

Viet Nam News Huê Phong QUẢNG BÌNH – It was during a trekking trip to the central Quảng Bình Province in 2014 that I first spotted wooden houses with tanks under them. This November I realised that these very houses had saved thousands of lives when the region flooded. I had stopped to rest at Tân Hóa Commune while trekking to Tú Làn, a karst cave close to the commune, in January 2014. As I looked around, I noticed that almost every house had another house in its compound that had large tanks fixed underneath it – some were steel, others were plastic, all were originally used as containers for oil or asphalt. These were the floating houses that I had only heard about till then. A local porter, Nguyễn Văn Sơn, who was accompanying me, explained that the tanks ensured the houses stayed above the floodwater and that these houses served as “lifejackets” for locals. The commune was in a low-lying region, surrounded by mountains and several streams, so it became an umbilicus for floodwater during the monsoon, Sơn said. These floating houses were shelters for locals when the region flooded; the rest of the time, people lived in…

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