The Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, has issued an urgent message to local provinces to cancel any planned meetings and focus their resources on coping with the coming typhoon.
“This is a very strong typhoon with a complicated route and it is forecast to trigger very heavy rains,” Mr. Dung said.
Packing wind speeds of up to 149 kilometers an hour, typhoon Nari was moving west-northwest at between 10-15 kilometers an hour, according to the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting.
The typhoon is forecast to hit coastal areas in Central Vietnam, including Danang and Hoian, on Tuesday morning.
“We have ordered all boats ashore and plan to evacuate a large number of people to safe shelters by the end of today,” Van Huu Chien, the chairman of the People’s Committee of Danang, told The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Chien said winds have started to intensify in the city and so has the rain. In a separate statement, the government said coast provinces in Central Vietnam planned to evacuate 155,000 people.
Nari will be the 11th major storm or typhoon to hit Vietnam this year. Each year the country is hit by around a dozen tropical storms, which often deliver heavy rains and floods.
Typhoon Wutip, which made landfall in central Vietnam two weeks ago, killed 16 people and injured 225 others, mostly due to flooding. More than 190 people have been killed by floods, storms and other natural calamities so far this year in Vietnam.