Vietnam flooding is blown out of proportion by the news

If you pay attention to SE Asian news at all you have likely heard the doom and gloom stories about how the entire country is underwater right now. I know that I get daily messages from concerned family and friends because they are lead to believe that the situation is really dire.

I'm here to tell you that while there are patches of devastation, the international news is making this out to be much more horrible than it actually is.

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I don't meant to be insensitive towards the people that were genuinely affected by this but the news is doing what the news does in order to make this appear as though it is far more widespread than it is.

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While there has been property damage and some situations where people went missing, for the most part things are pretty tame and under control. The word "Da Nang" is mentioned in nearly every news post that I read about this online and I live in Da Nang city. Other than a few streets with 6 inches of water accumulated that slows down traffic a bit, there is zero flooding here. There is some property damage because of the heavy rains but this was from poor construction practices more than anything else. I had some friends who had water damage from water coming through the windows and through the roof that was from water that was falling from the sky, but there hasn't been any flooding in the city.

I wish the news would stop doing this because this just makes it less likely that I and other people are going to believe them when there is a real emergency. Da Nang has experienced almost no damage and if anyone is missing, it is because they don't want to be found.

Now if we are looking at more rural areas that is more serious, but if the media put the names of those villages in the news nobody knows what it is. They are using the name Da Nang because it is internationally recognizable but there is no devastation here. It's just bad reporting .