Over 80,000 people flee severe flooding in southwest China

SHANGHAI, China: Flooding in China’s southwest has driven more than 80,000 people from their homes, state media said on Wednesday, 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.

Around 80,900 people had been evacuated by Tuesday afternoon in the southwestern province of Guizhou, state news agency Xinhua reported.

In Rongjiang county a football field was “submerged under three meters of water”, the news agency said.

Footage from state broadcaster CCTV showed severe flooding has inundated villages and collapsed a bridge in one mountainous area of the province.

Rescuers pushed boats carrying residents through murky, knee-high water and children waited in a kindergarten as emergency personnel approached them, the footage showed.

“The water rose very quickly,” resident Long Tian told Xinhua.

“I stayed on the third floor waiting for rescue. By the afternoon, I had been transferred to safety.”

A team was also seen preparing a drone to deliver supplies including rice to flood victims.

And in a video circulated by local media, truck driver You Guochun recounted his harrowing rescue after he ended up perched over the edge of a broken bridge segment.

“A bridge collapsed entirely in front of me,” he said. “I was terrified.”

Extreme weather

Floods have also hit the neighbouring Guangxi region, with state media publishing videos of rescuers there carrying residents to safety.

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated last week in the central Chinese province of Hunan due to heavy rain.

And nearly 70,000 people in southern China were relocated days earlier after heavy flooding caused by Typhoon Wutip.

Chinese authorities issued the year’s first red alerts last week for mountain torrents in six regions — the most severe warning level in the country’s four-tier system.

Some areas in the affected regions were “extremely likely to be hit”, Xinhua reported, with local governments urged to issue timely warnings to residents.

Climate change — which scientists say is exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions — is making such extreme weather phenomena more frequent and more intense.

Authorities in Beijing this week issued the second-highest heat warning for the capital on one of its hottest days of the year so far.

Last year was China’s hottest on record and the past four were its warmest ever.

China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter but is also a renewable energy powerhouse, seeking to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2060.