Damage in Xinshao

In Hunan alone, the torrential rain pounding central and southern China has affected six million people and destroyed or damaged 200,000 homes and other buildings, according to the Hunan-based Hongwang (Red Net) news website. Xinhua news agency said Tuesday [June 7] the death toll in Hunan has risen to 91. Rescuers have yet to reach some remote mountain villages, media reports said. The Chongqing Morning Post (Chongqing chenbao) reported Monday that Taizhimiao and Tanfu townships in Xinshao county, southwest of Hunan’s capital, Changsha, have borne the brunt of the devastation, with 43 people killed and 34 missing. In an on-line chat room, someone claimed those deaths were caused not by torrents of water rushing down from the mountains, but by the Yaoxuntang reservoir in Xinshao county bursting and drowning hundreds of people downstream. China Youth Daily (Zhongguo qingnian bao) dispatched a reporter, who discovered that while the Yaoxuntang reservoir, which holds 100,000 cubic metres of water, was intact, a small, 20-metre-high dam had indeed collapsed. Local people said the half-century-old Hongxing (Red Star) dam burst once before, in the 1990s, but had later been strengthened. However, it proved no match this time for the mountain torrent that swept it away. It is not known whether anyone died as a result of the dam burst. Xinshao officials said the Hongxing reservoir was no longer in use when the dam broke, and the accident was not the main cause of the deaths in the county. The incessant rain has also taken a heavy toll on Qijiang, Jiangjin and Wansheng in Chongqing municipality, upstream of the Three Gorges reservoir area, triggering hundreds of landslides and mud-rock flows, and destroying or damaging thousands of homes.

Sichuan-Guizhou rail line

No deaths were reported in the dramatic derailing of a freight train on the Sichuan-Guizhou line. Several gigantic boulders crashed down onto the line near Dongshengba in Qijiang county, but the train driver’s quick actions averted any deaths or injuries, reports said. Other landslides and rock falls occurred elsewhere in the area, causing widespread disruption to train traffic around the city of Chongqing. Jiao Meiyan, director of the National Meteorological Centre in Beijing, said that rainfall in most of southern China was 40 to 70 per cent higher than usual, with some places reporting as much as 150 per cent more precipitation than normal. At a meeting in the capital on Tuesday [June 7], meteorologists said the weather is “more complex” this year than usual, and more than 250 deaths in May could be attributed to weather-related disasters, Xinhua reported.

Three Gorges dam

It was the earliest start to the flood season in five years, and the Yangtze River basin should brace itself for even more rain in mid-June, and further floods, landslides and mud-rock flows, Xinhua quoted Mr. Jiao as saying.