Four dead, three missing in central China floods

Four people died and three were missing after heavy rain and flooding hit central China’s Hunan province, state media reported on Tuesday.

China is enduring a summer of extreme weather, with heavy rains battering swathes of the country and many regions enduring sweltering heat waves.

The country is by far the world’s largest emitter of the greenhouse gases that scientists say drive climate change and make extreme weather more frequent and intense.

More than 11,000 people were evacuated from Zixing in Hunan after the city experienced record rainfall — some areas receiving 645 millimetres (25 inches) in just 24 hours — state news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

The rains damaged nearly 900 homes and caused 1,345 road collapses, Xinhua added.

The downpours have been caused by the remnants of Typhoon Gaemi, which made landfall in eastern China on Thursday, with Hunan particularly hard hit.

On Sunday, a landslide destroyed a guesthouse and killed 15 people, while elsewhere in the province nearly 4,000 residents were evacuated after a dam breach.

On Monday, China’s National Meteorological Centre issued an orange alert, the second highest level, for rainstorms across much of the south, southwest, and centre of the country, as well as the capital Beijing, Hebei province, and Tianjin in the north.

In northeastern Liaoning province, more than 10,000 people were evacuated from areas near the Yalu River, on the border with North Korea, as waters rose.

Disaster agencies in the country have allocated 110,000 items of relief supplies to support emergency relocation of those affected and provide basic supplies in Liaoning, Jilin, Hunan, and Shaanxi provinces, state broadcaster CCTV reported. (BSS/AFP)