When the rain was going on I didn't really take it seriously just like everyone else in the town. We have gotten a little desensitized to warnings about big storms because the last couple that we were told were going to be really bad, one of which even had a government enforced curfew, turned out to be duds that did almost nothing. Such is the danger of excessive warnings I guess.
But when the aftermath of this recent rainstorm that carried almost no winds with it hit us, we realized that we were focusing on the wrong things. it wasn't wind that delivered a KO punch to certain parts of this community, but the extremely heavy rains that came along with it.
The northern part of the beach area here in Da Nang is called Son Tra, and they really got hit the worst out of all the various areas in this part of the country. The entire northern part of this peninsula of sorts has their road completely washed out. Under the road there was a drainage tunnel but it was overrun when it couldn't keep up with the waterflow and it burst resulting in massive erosion and eventually the collapse of the rather large street and footpath leading all the way to the beach.
Thankfully, as far as I know there wasn't any loss of life but there are people in that area that have businesses that are going to be completely wiped out by this. One of them is a rather nice places called 7 Bridges Brewery and I know two of the owners. They are trying to keep cool about this but they are most likely going to have to face a complete loss on this and at the moment they are not even being allowed into the building to survey the damage to all of their stuff or to move anything out because the structural integrity of the building is very bad right now and it could collapse.
The white building is 7 Bridges Brewery and the river in front of it did not exist before this storm. The owners of the business didn't own the building, they were leasing it, and it remains to be seen if the building is even capable of being opened again. This doesn't really matter because most of 7 Bridges was open-air seating and they are probably looking at rather extensive, or complete loss of value on all of those things including the expensive brewery equipment that was on the ground floor. They also had hundreds of kegs of completed product that was without refrigeration for many days. This might all be ruined but as of yet they have not been able to go and check because there is no road to get there.
This part of the boardwalk wasn't frequently used by anyone because this is not a highly sought after beach area. There will be even fewer people gathering there now because there isn't a path anymore. It remains to be seen if they decide to do something about the drainage first, which would make sense, or if they just fill it in and put it back the way it was before. It's tough to know what to do in these situations because this has never happened here before so is it really worth it to spend millions on something that only happens once every 20 years? I wouldn't want to be the person that has to make that call.
