HA LONG   -  Typhoon Yagi weakened to a tropical depression on Sunday, after killing over a dozen people, tearing roofs off buildings, sinking boats and triggering landslides across Vietnam. The typhoon had left a trail of destruction and two dozen people dead across southern China and the Philippines before it ravaged Vietnam. A family of four was killed on Sunday after heavy rain caused a hillside to give way and collapse onto a house in the mountainous Hoa Binh province of northern Vietnam, according to state media.

Since Friday, 10 others have been killed in storm-related incidents, some crushed by falling trees or drifting boats, the defence ministry’s disaster management agency. On Sunday afternoon, six more people, including a newborn baby and a one-year-old boy, were killed in a landslide in the Hoang Lien Son Mountains of northwestern Vietnam.

The slide was triggered by heavy rains and high winds after Yagi made landfall on Saturday, but authorities are yet to attribute the deaths to the storm.

“We found the six bodies, including a one-year-old boy and a newborn in the landslide,” a local official from the Sapa people’s committee, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

“The rain was heavy, weakening the soil and triggering landslide”.