Workers racing to drain reservoirs following China storms, 37 dead after multiple landslides

Race to drain reservoirs following China storms

BEIJING — Work crews raced to drain fast-rising reservoirs on opposite sides of China on Wednesday, following torrential rains that triggered deadly landslides in several mountain hamlets.

The death toll from the landslides in western China this week rose to 37, with 37 people still missing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

In the worst-hit community of Xiaohe in Yunnan province, the death toll climbed to 13 following a landslide that swept through town before dawn on Tuesday, Xinhua said.

Two landslides killed 14 in neighboring Sichuan province while in Hunan province, ten people including four young children died in two separate slides this week, the report said.

Meanwhile, the waters in a reservoir near the far western city of Golmud began to subside after hundreds of workers and soldiers finished digging a diversion channel, an official at the Qinghai province water bureau said.

More than 10,000 residents were evacuated as soldiers transported sandbags, rocks and dirt and used bulldozers to dig the emergency waterway, the Golmud city government website said.

Usually prone to drought, Qinghai has seen increasingly heavy rainfalls in recent years. This year’s rains fell as snow melted in the surrounding mountains. Dozens of reservoirs swelled beyond their warning levels, the water bureau official said.

In the eastern province of Anhui, workers were draining overflowing reservoirs and repairing damaged dams, Xinhua reported. About 70 percent of the 282 reservoirs in Chizhou city have exceeded warning levels due to torrential rains.

Since the beginning of July, flooding across China has killed 107 people, with 59 missing and nearly a million people evacuated from their homes as of Tuesday, Xinhua said.

More rain was expected to sweep through the Yangtze River basin, including Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces through Thursday, the China Meteorological Administration said.

Parts of China experience annual flooding but this year’s rains have been particularly devastating. Storms so far this month have caused economic losses of 19.8 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion), according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.