When Typhoon No. 7 wreaked havoc on the dikes in Nam Dinh, Thai Binh, and other areas, Mr. Chu Le Thang, the owner of a construction materials dealership in Thach Ban, Long Bien, Hanoi, sent a heartfelt letter to the Prime Minister presenting an initiative for a remote wave barrier that could mitigate dike breaches, flooding, and storm surges.
Having previously engaged in the bamboo pole trade and construction materials, Mr. Thang conceived the idea of developing a wave protection system during the storm season while working on riverbank stabilization and driving bamboo poles to prevent landslides. During Typhoon No. 7, he could not hold back his tears while watching the news coverage of breached dikes. Out of frustration, he stayed up all night sketching his idea. After his initial drafts, he began to explore the structure of the dike system in his area.
His field visits revealed that most river dikes were made simply of earth, making them highly susceptible to cracking and erosion. Consequently, Mr. Thang proposed embedding a system of concrete poles into the dike’s body as a framework to enhance its structural integrity against breaches. To address waves from 30 to 100 meters away, he developed additional strategies. The outermost layer, designed to withstand strong impacts, utilized an S-shaped buoy system. Water entering the frog-mouth gaps would be repelled back. The second layer, where wave energy diminished, employed folding buoys, while the third layer consisted of recycled tire tubes woven into long segments along the dike. Waves crashing from the sea would encounter barriers from all three layers of the wave deflection buoys, leading to significantly reduced wave force by the time they reached the shore.
On the night before finalizing his idea, Mr. Thang wrote a letter to Prime Minister Phan Van Khai the following day. In the letter, he expressed his desire to meet with the Prime Minister to elaborate further on his concept. Sent on October 3, the letter received a response on October 4, with the Prime Minister instructing the Department of Agriculture (Government Office) to collaborate with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to investigate Mr. Thang’s initiative.
However, since then, there has been no contact from the relevant authorities with Mr. Thang. “I plan to write another letter to the Prime Minister. I only hope that if the experiment is successful, I could request the government to apply it as a trial on a vulnerable dike section.”
Commenting on this idea, Associate Professor Tran Xuan Thai, Deputy Secretary-General of the Vietnam Hydraulic Engineering Association, stated: “As someone who specializes in river and sea dynamics, I am very impressed by Mr. Le Thang’s idea. This is one of those excellent concepts that demonstrates technical thinking, neutralizing distant waves before they can damage the shore. Both Vietnamese and international scientists have also studied wave-breaking structures like breakwaters placed offshore as barriers to reduce wave energy. Mr. Thang’s proposal for a remote wave barrier aligns well with this technical solution. However, it’s important to calculate the stability of the material structure against the forces of large waves.”
Science and Life
