VIETNAM (AFP) — Typhoon “Kalmaegi” churned across Vietnam Friday, claiming five more lives after its devastating passage through the Philippines where the death toll rose to 188.

“Kalmaegi” unleashed record rainfall and flooding in the central Philippines this week — sweeping away cars, trucks and shipping containers before lashing Vietnam late Thursday.

“The roof of my house was just blown away,” said Nguyen Van Tam, a 42-year-old fisherman in Vietnam’s Gia Lai province, where the storm made landfall packing sustained winds of up to 149 kilometers per hour, according to the environment ministry.

“We were all safe, (but) the typhoon was really terrible, so many trees fallen,” he said, adding that his boat had survived intact. 

Vietnamese authorities were still assessing the damage on Friday morning, but the environment ministry reported five dead, and 57 houses collapsed in Gia Lai and neighboring Dak Lak. 

Nearly 3,000 more had their roofs blown off or were damaged, it said, while 11 boats or ships sank. 

In the streets along Gia Lai’s Quy Nhon beach, Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists saw rescue workers and soldiers working with residents to clear uprooted trees, remove debris and collect sheet-metal roofs blown away in the night.

“This was a very big typhoon that hit us,” Tran Ngo An, 64, told AFP. “This was the second time I witnessed such a typhoon. The other one was 10 years ago or so, but not that strong as compared to this.”

The state power company said 1.6 million clients lost electricity as the typhoon smashed the central coast, but service to a third of them had been restored by Friday morning. 

Vietnam is in one of the most active tropical cyclone regions on Earth and is typically affected by 10 typhoons or storms a year, but “Kalmaegi” was the 13th of 2025.

Fast-moving “Kalmaegi” had already swept northwest toward Laos by morning with significantly weakened winds, but heavy rain was still forecast for much of Vietnam’s central coast, the national weather bureau said. 

The storm was next forecast to hit Thailand, which issued a warning Friday for heavy rainfall and flooding starting in the northeast but spreading to the rest of the country.