China issues highest-level rainstorm warning after deadly floods
More than 100,000 people have been evacuated due to heavy rain and fatal floods in southern China, with the government issuing its highest-level rainstorm warning for the affected area on Tuesday.
Torrential rains have lashed Guangdong in recent days, swelling rivers and raising fears of severe flooding that state media said could be of the sort only "seen around once a century".
On Tuesday, the megacity of Shenzhen was among the areas experiencing "heavy to very heavy downpours", the city's meteorological observatory said, adding the risk of flash floods was "very high".
It later downgraded its weather warning as the storms weakened, but urged residents to remain vigilant against disasters.
Images from Qingyuan — a city in northern Guangdong that is part of the low-lying Pearl River Delta — showed a building almost completely submerged in a flooded park next to a river.
Official media reported on Sunday that more than 45,000 people had been evacuated from Qingyuan, which straddles the Bei River tributary. State news agency Xinhua said 110,000 residents across Guangdong had been relocated since the downpours started over the weekend. The floods have claimed the lives of four people so far and 10 are missing, according to state media.
In Foshan, a city in the centre of the province, a further four people were missing after a ship struck a bridge in an incident that "may have been... due to the influence of flooding", Xinhua reported on Tuesday, citing local authorities.
The vessel, which was carrying nearly 5,000 tonnes of rolled steel, smacked into a pillar of the Jiujiang Bridge on Monday evening, catapulting several of its 11 crew members into the water.
Seven people were rescued before the ship sank just before midnight, Xinhua said.
Aerial shots from Guangdong showed brown gashes in the side of a hill — the aftermath of landslides that had occurred behind a town on the banks of a swollen river.
Soldiers could be seen operating excavators in an attempt to clear away the muddy debris produced by the downpour.
Climate change driven by human-emitted greenhouse gases makes extreme weather events more frequent and intense, and China is the world's biggest emitter. Parts of Guangdong have not seen such severe flooding so early in the year since records began in 1954, the state-run China National Radio reported.
Yin Zhijie, the chief hydrology forecaster at the Ministry of Water Resources, told the broadcaster that "intensifying climate change" had raised the likelihood of the kind of heavy rains not typically seen until June or July.