TWTBACD Ch.68 - The Flood of 2065

Chapter 68

The Flood of 2065

2065 — Natural Catastrophe

2065: Mekong flood, 2,317 dead, Minh in the water

The October 2065 flooding of the Mekong Delta was, by every measure, the worst in recorded history.

The combination of factors had been predicted by the delta management AI systems eighteen months in advance: sea level rise of thirty-two centimetres above 2020 baseline, a typhoon making landfall at an angle that maximised storm surge, exceptional upstream rainfall driven by the atmospheric river patterns that had become characteristic of the region. The prediction was right. The preparedness was not adequate.

Minh Nguyen — forty-nine, a professor of delta hydrology at Hanoi University — had submitted an emergency preparedness report to the Vietnamese government in June 2064 based on the AI projections. The report had been reviewed, acknowledged, and not acted upon in the ways that mattered: the evacuation infrastructure was not improved, the coastal barriers were not upgraded, the early warning system was not extended to the communities most at risk.

When the water arrived, Minh was in the field. He spent three weeks in the delta coordinating the data collection effort — not the rescue, for which he was not trained, but the documentation, for which he was uniquely equipped. He measured water levels, collected sediment samples, monitored the aquifer response to saltwater intrusion. He sent the data to every institution he could reach. He wrote, at night in a shelter, the paper that would eventually lead to the mandatory delta management protocols that every low-lying coastal delta in the world adopted in 2068.

Two thousand three hundred and seventeen people died. It was a smaller number than it would have been without any preparation. It was a number that should have been smaller still.

Minh came home to Hanoi exhausted, thinner, and in possession of the specific quality that survivors of sustained emergency work carry: the knowledge that you did the work you could do and that the work was insufficient and that it was still the right work.

He called his father.

'The data?' Tuan asked.

'All sent.'

'Then you did what you could.'

'It wasn't enough.'

'It never is,' Tuan said. 'You go back and you do more.'