3,000 homes on Vietnam's biggest island left without water for 2 days

Nearly 3,000 households in southern Phu Quoc went without running water for more than two days after an excavator opening a drainage channel struck a transmission main.

Service returned at 1 p.m. on July 16, ending an outage that began around 10:30 a.m. on July 14.

The Phu Quoc Water Supply and Drainage Branch picked up an unexplained pressure drop across its network on the morning of July 14. Heavy rain had left the An Thoi area under widespread flooding, and crews needed more than 24 hours to find the fault.

They traced it to a 400 mm transmission main inside a utility chamber where a stormwater culvert crosses the pipeline on Provincial Road 975, in Neighborhood 6 of the former An Thoi Ward.

Rain that day had pooled across the area and threatened to flood nearby homes. After residents complained, a contractor working on road construction nearby sent an excavator to cut a drainage channel, and the machine hit the main.

With the chamber underwater, the utility hired divers to reach the damaged section.

"To ensure water supply for residents, we have asked the Phu Quoc Special Zone People's Committee to direct infrastructure contractors to notify and coordinate with the water utility so this does not happen again," branch director Lam Phuoc Tho told local media.

Workers repair the ruptured water pipe in Phu Quoc on the morning of July 16, 2026. Photo by Duong Dong

Phu Quoc draws its water from Duong Dong Lake, which holds about 5.9 million cubic meters and supplies roughly 14,000 households. A second plant, Duong Dong 2, with a capacity of 36,000 cubic meters a day, is scheduled to open next year.

The island covers 570 sq.km and has a population of nearly 160,000. It became a special zone under An Giang Province in Vietnam's 2025 administrative restructuring, and its beaches draw both domestic and foreign visitors.