Saved from the floodwaters: Chinese village in path of Yangtze deluge
- The South China Morning Post joins a rescue boat in flood-hit Jiangxi province where 20,000 people are stranded
- Memories of 1998 as authorities raise warning for China’s largest freshwater lake to highest alert level
The riverbank was breached around Wednesday afternoon. Huang Huoxiu stood in her three-storey house, a few hundred metres away, and watched the water heading towards her.
At the same time, she spotted one of her neighbours with three small children, heading out of their village in southern China. Huang screamed on the top of her lungs, “Don’t go any further! You’ll drown!”
She took them into her house where, within half an hour, the water had risen to the second floor. They took refuge on the third floor but there was no time for Huang to gather her belongings and she lost her cellphone to the flood, she told the South China Morning Post.
The neighbour broke down crying. “It’s so horrifying!” she kept saying as Huang told her to stay put and not worry about what they would eat or how they would live.
Huang’s village of Qiaotou in Shangrao, Jiangxi province, is just one of many which flooded in the area this week, where 20,000 residents are stranded without power or fresh water. She told her story to the South China Morning Post on Saturday, when she was rescued by her son Huang Shuangxi and firefighters after three days of surviving on biscuits and water.