At least 16 dead and 200,000 evacuated by heavy flooding in central China

Severe flooding caused by heavy rains in the past three days in central China has killed at least 16 people and forced more than 200,000 people to evacuate to safer areas.

The storm, which has thrown the equivalent of a whole year of rainfall in 72 hours, has also forced the army to mobilize, given the threat of collapse of a dam near Zhengzhou, with 10 million inhabitants, capital of Henan province. located about 650 kilometers southwest of Beijing and the city most affected by the meteorological disaster.

A second reservoir near Luoyang, a town of seven million people in the same province, is also threatening to rupture.

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Entire neighborhoods flooded and turned into quagmires;

citizens dragged by the force of the water in avenues turned into real rivers;

submerged vehicles;

hospitals flooded and without electricity;

subway stations filled with water, with passengers trapped inside the cars.

These are some of the scenes that local media in Zhengzhou have broadcast on video.

More videos coming out on the situation earlier on Tuesday night in the Zhengzhou subway.

From what I can find now, the majority of passengers got out safely, but unfortunately, some did not.

(Please comment with source link if more is known on this 🙏.) Pic.twitter.com/5CyvauugSK

- Manya Koetse (@manyapan) July 20, 2021

The Government of this city, located on the banks of the Yellow River, specified that 12 of the deceased perished in a flooded subway line, while another 500 passengers managed to be rescued.

A video posted on social media showed travelers in the dark and submerged up to their necks in a wagon covered in cloudy water, as well as a flooded underground station.

"The water was up to my chest," one survivor wrote online.

"I was very afraid, but the most terrifying thing was not the water, but the air that was beginning to be lacking in the wagon."

Torrential rains had caused the city's public buses, which run on electricity, to be suspended shortly before, a citizen with only his last name, Guo, told Reuters.

Without being able to use the buses, “many people took the subway and the tragedy occurred,” said this man, who was forced to spend the night at his workplace.

Cars washed away by heavy rains in Zhengzhou on Thursday.

STR / AFP

From Saturday night until late Tuesday, 617 liters of rain fell in Zhengzhou, an amount that almost equals the annual average rainfall that is collected in this city. According to local media meteorologists, this is something you only see once every “thousand years”. These unusual rains have caused several streams to overflow in the vast basin of the Yellow River.

The situation of dozens of reservoirs and dams is of particular concern to the Chinese authorities.

In addition to the risk of overflowing many of them, there are two dams whose walls have been cracked.

In Luoyang, a town of seven million people west of Zhengzhou, the Yihetan reservoir has a 20-meter crack in its retaining wall, confirmed a statement from the Chinese Army, which warned that the dam “may collapse at any time. ”.

The Army has also announced that it has sent soldiers to try to divert river floods with controlled explosions of dynamite.

In Zhengzhou, the local flood control headquarters announced that another dam, the Guojiazui water reservoir, which supplies city residents, is also cracked.

Henan Province is a major logistics hub in central China, home to major telecommunications and automotive companies.

Many of them have had to stop production and provide accommodation and food for their employees.

Other city residents had to spend the night in libraries, museums, and even movie theaters.

Local media reported that young children had been trapped in their nurseries since Tuesday.

Several hospitals, including Zhengzhou University, the largest in the city, with more than 7,000 beds, were left without electricity and even without reserve supplies, making it necessary to find transportation to relocate some 600 patients to critical condition.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has demanded in a circular that local authorities give the highest priority to guaranteeing the safety of the population and their property, and that protection measures against floods be extreme.