Six people today died due to severe flooding in Southwest China’s Guizhou province amid continuous heavy rainfall. The heavy rainfall and upstream inflows have triggered severe flooding in Rongjiang and Congjiang counties of Guizhou. As per reports, over 80 thousand people have been evacuated from the flood hit areas in the country.
Towns and villages by a key river in China’s Guangxi lay half-submerged as floodwaters from a province upstream roared into the mountainous region, with the expected landfall of a tropical cyclone later on Thursday compounding disaster risk.
The flooding that overwhelmed the counties of Rongjiang and Congjiang in Guizhou province on Tuesday has spread downstream to other parts of southwest China, including rural settlements in Guangxi by the Liu River, which originates from Guizhou.
Displaced residents were forced to stay at local hotels, which were also hosting rescue personnel and reconstruction workers, according to Reuters.
As deluge-hit areas began to remove silt left behind by the flooding and restore power, water and phone lines – a tropical depression was expected to strike Guangxi on Thursday night. The storm risks a new round of flooding.
The tropical depression made landfall on China’s island province of Hainan early on Thursday, and later again in Guangdong on the mainland. It brought further rain to a region still suffering after Typhoon Wutip two weeks ago.
On Tuesday, at least six people died when Rongjiang – a city of around 300,000 residents where three rivers meet – was hit by a flood on a scale that Chinese meteorologists said could only happen once in 50 years. At one point, the flow rate in the River Liu was more than 80 times the average.
Extreme storms and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for Chinese officials. The storms threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences, displace millions of people and cause billions of dollars in economic losses.
“Climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and unpredictable,” said Chen Xiaoguang, a professor at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, in Sichuan province. “Rural areas face significant challenges due to limited infrastructure and resources,” he added.
On Thursday, state broadcaster CCTV said “exceptionally large floods” had swept through Guizhou’s Rongjiang county since Tuesday.
China is enduring a summer of extreme weather. This week, authorities issued the second-highest heat warning for the capital, Beijing, on one of its hottest days of the year so far.
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated last week in Hunan province – neighbouring Guizhou – due to heavy rain. Flood alarms have been triggered along 20 rivers running through Guangxi in recent days, Xinhua reported.
Landslides and flooding have damaged communications infrastructure in the region, with Guangxi’s telecommunications authorities vowing to “actively communicate and share information” with other government departments for disaster relief.
China is enduring a summer of extreme weather. This week, authorities issued the second-highest heat warning for the capital Beijing on one of its hottest days of the year so far.
And tens of thousands of people were evacuated last week in Hunan province – neighbouring Guizhou – due to heavy rain
