Twenty-five year-old mother Tran Thi Muoi was woken up by the noise of violent winds blowing away the roof of her house at midnight. Inside the house, the water, brought in by heavy rain, rose quickly. Muoi held up her son in a panic. "The storm came all of a sudden. We were not informed of or warned about it. We didn't have enough time to do anything. I took my son to the attic," she said.
If Vietnam's disaster-prone regions had a good warning system in place in 2009, Muoi wouldn't have had to risk her life and the life of her son.