SHANGHAI: Flooding in China’s southwest has driven more than 80,000 people from their homes, state media said on Wednesday (Jun 25), as a collapsed bridge forced the dramatic rescue of a truck driver left dangling over the edge.
China is enduring a summer of extreme weather, with heat waves scorching wide swaths of the country while rainstorms pummel other regions.
Climate change – which scientists say is exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions – is making such weather more frequent and more intense.
Around 80,900 people had been evacuated by Tuesday afternoon in the southwestern province of Guizhou, state news agency Xinhua reported.
“It’s very bad this time,” Xiong Xin, a member of a rescue team who was in Rongjiang county on Tuesday, told AFP, describing the flooding as a “once-in-50-year event”.
Images shared with AFP by Xiong showed a row of shops on the first floor of a building submerged, with residents leaning out of second-floor windows.
In Rongjiang county, a football field was “submerged under 3m of water”, the news agency said.
Rescuers pushed boats carrying residents through murky, knee-high water and children waited in a kindergarten as emergency personnel approached them, the footage showed.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-flood-guizhou-over-80000-people-evacuated-5202221
