Associated Press
Published: July 23, 2016
A majority of the fatalities were reported in the northern province of Hebei. The provincial Department of Civil Affairs announced 114 people had been killed and 111 others were missing. In the city of Xingtai, 25 people were killed and another 13 were missing.
The Xingtai village of Daxian was swamped by a flash flood early Wednesday as residents were asleep. Eight people, including three children, were killed and another was missing in the flood, according to the Xingtai government.
Friday, accounts, purportedly by local residents, began surfacing on Chinese social media of angry villagers blocking roads, accusing the local authorities of failing to notify them in time for evacuation when an upstream reservoir discharged the floodwaters.
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Authorities blamed extraordinary rainfall and a failure of a river levee near the village for the sudden water surge. Local media reported that the river channel is particularly narrow near the village of Daxian and has been blocked by pipes from a heating utility, as well as mud.
Qiu Wenshuang, a vice mayor of Xingtai, said Saturday that the flood was sudden and that the village was already flooded when officials arrived there to evacuate residents on Wednesday morning, according to state media reports.
Beijing has been hit by constant rain since Tuesday of last week, which has forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and trains and flooded city streets.
Tens of thousands have been evacuated from flood-hit areas and direct economic losses have risen into the hundreds of millions of dollars. President Xi Jinping on Wednesday warned the country to be prepared for more hardship to come and said officials found negligent in their duties would be severely punished.
China’s south has also been hit by floods that strike annually during the monsoon season that began in May, but this rainy season has been particularly wet. Water levels in some major rivers have exceeded those of 1998, when the worst floods in recent years killed 4,150 people, most of them along the Yangtze River, China’s mightiest.
https://youtu.be/gRFKv5xcI_k
This year’s monsoon floods are the second-costliest on record in China
More than 145,000 homes have been destroyed in the summer floods, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters reports, and an incredible 21,000 square miles of farmland have been inundated so far. That’s approximately the size of Massachussetts and Vermont combined.
Last week, the government said this year’s floods have cost China more than $22 billion, which makes it the second-costliest flood on record in China and the fifth-costliest weather disaster that has taken place outside the United States, according to EM-DAT, the international disasters database managed by the government of Belgium.
The monsoon hasn’t been this bad in China since 1998, when the country’s worst weather disaster on record killed more than 4,000 people and tallied $44 billion in damage.
Heavy rain and thunderstorms wash across China every summer during the monsoon season beginning in May, but this year has been particularly devastating in part due to the presence of El Niño earlier in 2016.
Monsoon rain concentrates over China and Taiwan during the summer months along a stationary boundary in the atmosphere, locally called the mei-yu front. Large masses of thunderstorms called mesoscale convective complexes churn eastward along this front.
Researchers have noted that in seasons after strong El Niños, the rainfall that occurs along the mei-yu front is especially torrential and long-lived. That connection is clear in the data, with the floods in 1998 — also a very strong El Niño year — being the deadliest and most expensive weather disaster in China.
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