Flooding hits southern China with 14 million affected
- Extreme seasonal weather displaces 744,000 people and causes US$3.8 billion in economic losses across 26 provinces and cities
- Authorities report 81 missing or dead and more than 10,000 homes destroyed as rivers reach historic levels
The Ministry of Emergency Management said 744,000 people across 26 provinces and cities had been displaced, with 81 missing or dead, and more than 10,000 houses had collapsed.
Separately, authorities in the southwestern province of Sichuan reported three people dead and 12 missing on Saturday after overnight rainstorms in Mianning county. In one incident, two vehicles fell into a river, killing two people and leaving three others unaccounted for.
China is experiencing an unusually intense flood season this year, with rainstorm alerts issued for 26 consecutive days in June, according to state news agency Xinhua.
“In the 20-odd days since June, the water levels of 197 rivers have overflowed the warning mark, 10 of which were at historic levels. This concentrated occurrence of flooding is rare for recent years,” Liu Zhiyu, deputy director of the water resources ministry’s hydrological forecast centre, told Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily on June 25.
In the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, a red alert was raised on June 22 for the Qi River – the first time the highest level flood warning had been issued since the city’s hydrology monitoring system was built 80 years ago, People’s Daily reported.
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Dramatic rescue as nearly 14 million people affected by floods in China
A Chongqing tea house owner, surnamed Qin, uploaded a video to Chinese social media which showed the entire ground floor of his shop flooded with muddy water. “When I woke up in the morning, I saw the water had broken through the glass door,” he said in a Pear Video report.
Hubei province, which saw the worst of the new coronavirus outbreak in China, was also on alert for heavy storms and flooding. Cities such as Yichang saw streets submerged and electric motorcycles carried off by the floodwaters, according to news magazine Caixin.
02:16
Deadly floods and torrential rain in China affect over 8.5 million people
In the Hubei city of Huanggang, village official Liu Shuicun, 58, was swept away by floodwaters on June 21 when he fell into the river while doing relief work. Rescue teams were still searching for Liu as of June 23, Hubei Television reported.
The National Climate Centre said the extreme weather patterns were due to a weak El Nino effect that began in November last year, according to People’s Daily, and is expected to continue affecting southwestern China and the downstream region of the Yangtze River.
El Nino is a climate cycle that begins in the Pacific Ocean and can trigger weather patterns including rains, storms or droughts in other parts of the world, months after it forms.
