Every storm turns Hanoi into a lake. Where did all the drainage money go?

I left my office in Dong Da at 4:15 p.m., knowing it would be rough. Google Maps glowed red with traffic. But nothing prepared me for the nightmare ahead.

Major roads: Lang, Nguyen Trai, Tay Son... turned into canals. Motorbikes died midstream, cars froze with hazard lights blinking, and people trudged knee-deep through filthy water. Shops became impromptu shelters for broken scooters, repair stalls overflowed with soaked commuters shivering in the rain.

By 7 p.m. I was still 5 km from home, staring at a city in paralysis. Elderly people and children stood stranded. Parents texted frantically that they could not reach their kids at schools. Delivery drivers gave up after endless cancellations. It felt less like a rainstorm, more like a collective breakdown.

And the question kept hammering in my mind: how many more times will Hanoi drown? We’ve heard about billion-dollar drainage projects, grand promises of "flood control once and for all." Yet here we are, Venice after every cloudburst, except without gondolas or poetry.

Weather cannot be tamed, but cities can be built to cope. Hanoi has the resources, but not the urgency. If flooding remains the capital’s default setting, then the real storm is not in the sky; it is in the way this city is managed.