Government officials estimate some 500,000 people in the Mekong Delta area alone need to be moved out of such landslide zones. Hundreds more have evacuated in-stream islands that were literally disappearing beneath their feet. In recent years, thousands of acres of rice farms have been lost, and at least 1,200 families have had to be relocated. In towns and villages all along the Mekong River and many other rivers around the country, banks undermined by dredging are collapsing into the water, taking with them farm fields, fish ponds, shops, and homes. Along with sand mining, climate change and the building of dams threaten fishing and other uses of the river. ( Read about the damming of the Mekong in the magazine.)Ī barge loaded with freshly dredged sand passes by an abandoned house on the Tien River, as the northern branch of the Mekong is called in Vietnam. Demand for it is surging-and that is wreaking havoc not only on Vietnam’s rivers, but also on the all-important Mekong Delta. Sand is a key ingredient in concrete, the essential building material of Vietnam’s fast-growing cities. In recent years, that humble substance has become an astonishingly hot commodity. The main causes of the collapse can be seen floating in many places on the Tien’s murky waters: dredging boats, using rackety pumps to raise from the river bed enormous quantities of sand. We used to sleep in that house,” she says. “If it had happened at night, I and my grandsons would have died. “ It took all of what we owned to build the house, and now it's all gone,” she sighs. “It crashed with a huge sound, boom, boom, boom.”īe and her son escaped unharmed, but the coffee shop and her nearby house were destroyed. The river bank was crumbling into the water. Suddenly, the ground beneath them gave way. One afternoon last year, Ha Thi Be, 67, was sitting with her son in her tiny coffee shop in the town of Hong Ngu, looking out on the lazy Tien River, the main branch of the Mekong in Vietnam.
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