It is great to be back in our house! Though the adventure continues. It seems that the work on the drainage system that had begun and not completed before the flood is now being worked on in earnest. This has made leaving our area interesting, with some parts we drive on a few feet wide. Of course that's what makes it fun. It is messy though. Across from our house is a huge pile of rubble. Here is Brittany standing in front of it.

Ann and I did have a somewhat scary Vietnam moment. When there is heavy equipment being used, there is no roping off or fencing in an area. A backhoe had been brought in to dig more of the trench for the drainage and it was taking up the whole alley way. If we wanted to get home, we needed to get past the backhoe. There was a foot or two to spare to go by with the motorcycle. Kind of scary. This is the trench with the new drainage system. They built it up with bricks and then put cement over the bricks. Then capped it with concrete blocks.

After the flood, our landlord came over and agreed that our kitchen cabinets need to be moved out to investigate why water was gushing out from under the cabinets during the storm. I guess we had 17 inches in 18 hours and 25 inches for the weekend. Hopefully this week our landlord will come with the workers to do that. They will dig down to the foundation, where we think there must be a large crack to have let in so much water.

This storm, the largest in 35 years for Hanoi, happened during the dry season. We are thankful everything is back to normal in the city.

House relatively dry

Today, Ann and I went to the house. All the water, except for a few puddles, is out of the house. Our first floor seems more like a pig-sty. But I am glad we can start cleaning. We threw out a lot of garbage today. Tomorrow, we hope to continue cleaning and hope to have electricity checked and maybe switched back on. Lots of mosquitoes have decided to move in. We hope to serve them an eviction notice in the next day or two. We are very blessed by a number of people offering to come and help us clean tomorrow. If you come, bring a bucket, a towel, a bottle of bleach and a pair of gloves. We hope to have pictures of the clean up crew.

Here's a house pumping out water on the way to our house.


On the way to our house...the water gets deeper the further down we went.

Rain, rain, go away, come back some other day (in lesser amounts please). That is how we felt as we began to quickly move our refrigerator and other items out of the water that was starting to spread through our house. Later in the morning, we lifted our refrigerator out of the water, and the washing machine and the whole house stabilizer. The stabilizer was much heavier than I would have thought, weighing more than 300 pounds (I did not have time to weigh it..ha ha).

Hanoi experienced its worst storm in the last 35 years. With some places in Hanoi having more than 4 feet of water. Our house had more than a foot. But as bad as the city was hit, the country side outside of Hanoi was much worse. One friend of ours who helps with aid in disasters took some of the pictures you see here on a survey trip. Some places were 10 to 13 feet high in water.

We are thankful that we are safe and dry at a friends house. A wonderful and blessed provision.


Tonight as I write this there is supposed to be another big storm, we are praying otherwise.

The water is mostly out of our house. Yea! Ann and I went tonight and dumped the dehumidifiers and checked on the water level. The only place with water now is about a third of the kitchen (where it all began). We hope to begin cleanup tomorrow.