BEIJING: Torrential rainfall continued to lash parts of southern China on Sunday, triggering mudslides and flash floods in provinces such as Jiangxi and Hunan, where more than 10 people died.
Weather forecasters have warned that the downpours will further intensify in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River this week.
Two people died in a house collapse in a township in the city of Jiujiang, Jiangxi, while eight were killed in Hunan when a mudslide flattened four houses in a village in the province’s Xinhuang Dong autonomous county, China Central Television and Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.
Flooding in a township in Huaihua, Hunan, also caused one death on Sunday, while another person was reported missing, CCTV reported.
Heavy downpours battered the northwestern parts of Jiangxi starting on Saturday, with 14 monitoring stations in three counties reporting “severe rainfall”, according to local authorities.
Yang Xiaoxiao, an official at Jiangxi’s flooding and drought prevention department, emphasized the importance of focusing on the safety of embankments during heavy rains, and called for increasing crews and the frequency of patrols.
According to the Hunan Meteorological Bureau, 184 townships in the province experienced heavy downpours over the weekend.
On Sunday morning, the National Meteorological Center issued an orange alert for rainstorms, with vast regions in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River expected to witness heavy rainfall until Monday afternoon. China has a four-tier weather warning system, with red representing the most severe warning, followed by orange, yellow and blue.
The China Meteorological Administration raised the national emergency response level from three to two on Sunday.
The country also has a four-tier emergency response system, with level one being the most severe.
Meteorological experts warned that the overlapping of heavy rainfall areas increases the risks of flooding, geological disasters and waterlogging in urban and rural areas of several provinces such as Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
