If I had told you how bad our construction standards were, or how much forest we’d lost to illegal logging, you wouldn’t have believed me... until Ketsana hit and left our nation’s inadequacies bare for all to see.

We found out when the typhoon hit that the embankment along Nguyen Tat Thanh Street in Da Nang City, which had been billed as “permanent enough to withstand heavy storms” was in fact built without a single piece of solid steel.

A series of electric poles were felled easily by the storm’s winds, revealing that they had never been planted properly in the first place.

Residents asked about the shoddy work and authorities shrugged it off, saying “we’ll have another look at the design.”

But one of the worst things Ketsana brought to our doorsteps were the thousands of cubic meters of illegally cut logs that floated with the floods through the lowlands of Quang Nam and Kon Tum provinces. Like so many twigs in a stream, the carefully pre-cut logs – ready for smuggling – raced the rapids through small towns and countryside.

Forest management officers were certainly caught with their pants down. Those logs were not exceptions, they were the rule. Residents have every right to demand that the rangers explain how so much ready-to-be-trafficked contraband had not been found.

So much timber was being carried by the floods that Kon Tum authorities had to block Dak Bla bridge, lest the runaway wood crash into the structure and bring it tumbling down.

And then we lost more trees as loggers took advantage of lawlessness during the storm.

We could hear the buzzing of mechanic saws and the falling timber throughout our forests in the middle of the torrential rains.

But is it the rangers’ fault?

Loggers don’t really have to worry about forest rangers as they know our parks’ departments are poorly-staffed and poorly-equipped. Even if the illegal timber is seized, the loggers know that they can buy it back easily.

And the timber piracy causes other problems aside from the emptying of our precious forests.

Without these trees as resistance, the floods this year were faster and stronger than ever before.

The force wiped out riverside villages along the Truong Son Mountain Range and swept away chunks of a new urban area project in Kon Tum.

Local forests have also been sacrificed for “legal” purposes. Quang Nam Province has licensed a power plant project to replace 4,000 hectares of forest and another 6,000 will be lost to resettlement areas and a large-scale electricity network.

It’s painfully and shamefully ironic that the province was awarded US$75,000 by the Swiss Reinsurance for a forest protection project in 2004.

Some of the trees that have been cut down recently were over 100 years old.

The typhoon has negated previous reports that green cover throughout the country was going to increase this year over last year.

It has also proven false reports that forest rangers were “tracking down illegal loggers and reducing crime” – by “remarkable” amounts, one report said.

Natural disasters are inevitable.

But it’s unfair to let our innocent residents pay for believing such lies while those who continue to destroy our environment do so more and more every day because their profits keep rising.

And worst, it’s our children, and their children, who will suffer most of all the terrible consequences of our ignorance.

Reported by Dang Ngoc Khoa – Tra Son