Flooding damage to eclipse Typhoon Ketsana
As severe flooding continues to plague provinces along the Mekong River and around the Tonle Sap lake, new figures released by aid groups and officials yesterday showed that the scale of the disaster is far bigger than initially expected and could be worse than Typhoon Ketsana, which wreaked havoc on Cambodia in 2009. According to the Cambodian Red Cross, nearly 40,000 families have now been evacuated to safe high-ground areas in five provinces alone, while a government officials said that about 163,000 hectares of paddy fields are inundated with floodwaters in 14 provinces. The figures represent a three-fold increase from the previous government estimates of the number of evacuees and a four-fold jump in the extent of flood damage to crops…
