Thursday, October 21, 2010

Fifteen dead found with sunken Vietnamese bus

HANOI, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Vietnamese salvage crews dragged a sunken bus and the bodies of 15 passengers out of a swollen river on Thursday, three days after floodwaters swept the vehicle off a highway in central Vietnam, media reported.

The end of the rainy season often brings severe weather in east Asia. One of the biggest typhoons in years was threatening the Chinese coast after battering the Philippines while Thailand and Cambodia were also facing deadly floods.

In Vietnam, some of the worst flooding in years had killed 54 people and left 20 missing in the past week, according to the government’s main website (http://www.chinhphu.vn).

Several dozen other people were killed in flooding about two weeks ago in the same region, which is outside Vietnam’s main rice-growing area and far north of the Central Highlands coffee belt.

Hundreds of people crowded on a hill to watch the salvage operation that began early on Thursday, 320 km (200 miles) south of Hanoi in Ha Tinh province.

People lit incense for the dead on the bank of the brown Lam river, where the bus was submerged, media photographs showed.

Ten of the bodies recovered on Thursday were found in the bus and the other five were in the river nearby, VnExpress.net reported.

There were 37 people on the bus when it was overcome by the floodwater and 18 escaped before it sank, the Vietnamnet.vn website reported. The others were not accounted for.

The sunken bus could not be found for three days and the head of the provincial border guard even consulted a famous psychic to try to locate it, it said.

Officials finally found it late on Wednesday, not far from where the psychic had predicted it would be, but they decided not to try to dredge it out until Thursday, it said.