- China’s north and west on alert for heavy rains.
- Storms in China’s southwest lead to deadly flash floods.
- Extreme rainfall increasingly poses a major challenge for China.
BEIJING: China’s north and west braced for more flash floods and landslides on Thursday as annual ‘Plum Rains’ left a trail of destruction and prompted the mobilisation of thousands of rescue workers to pull people from floodwaters.
Red alerts were issued tracing the rains as they moved from the southwestern province of Sichuan through the northwestern province of Gansu, and up to the northeastern province of Liaoning.
While some Beijing-bound trains were suspended and one of the city’s airports experienced flight delays and cancellations late on Wednesday and into the early hours.
Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for policymakers as they threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences, displace millions and wreak havoc on China’s $2.8 trillion agricultural sector.
Economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $10 billion last July, when the ‘Plum Rains’ – named for their timing coinciding with plums ripening along China’s Yangtze River during the East Asia monsoon – typically reach their peak.
State media said over 1,000 rescue workers were dispatched to the town of Taiping in central China’s Henan province on Wednesday, after torrential rains caused a nearby river to burst its banks, killing five people in a flash flood and leaving three others missing.
Two more people died in a landslide at a construction side in Gansu province caused by heavy rains over Wednesday and Thursday, a separate state media report said.
During a two-day visit to the northern province of Hebei, which borders Henan, Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing urged local officials to step up efforts ahead of anticipated heavy rain to minimise casualties by preemptively evacuating people, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
While China has a nationwide severe weather monitoring and forecasting system, scientists say very localised predictions remain a challenge, testing the ability of particularly rural communities with fewer forecasting resources to evacuate local populations quickly ahead of any extreme weather.
Further south, in China’s Guangxi region, several buildings slid down hillsides over the last two days after their foundations gave way in waterlogged soil, local media reported.
Footage verified by Reuters shows a five-storey building under construction in the town of Xinzhou collapsing into a nearby river within seconds, as the ground beneath it suddenly gave way.
Between June 30 and July 1, the Lengshui River which flows through Xinzhou experienced its worst flooding in records going back to 2005, said a separate local media report, citing the Ministry of Water Resources. The report also instructed readers on how to recognise early signs of flash flooding.
Meanwhile, in Pingliu Village, some 80km (50 miles) west of Xinzhou, 21 people from seven households were evacuated on Tuesday after a landslide collapsed two houses and damaged four others, other local media reported.
In contrast, the national meteorological centre forecast scorching heat along the country’s eastern seaboard.