Floods in China

The remnants of China’s strongest typhoon this year brought heavy rain and flooding to the capital and other regions, flooding roads, disrupting transport and setting rainfall records in central and eastern provinces.

The storm made landfall in Zhejiang province on August 9 after travelling 6,000 kilometres, before weakening and drawing tropical moisture deep inland.

Changping district recorded the city’s highest hourly rainfall, receiving 90.7 millimetres of rain in the hour after 9 a.m., authorities said.
The storm’s remnants continued to threaten flooding in northern and central China as its extensive rain bands brought further downpours.

In Yuhuan, a coastal city in Zhejiang province, nearly 200 millimetres of rain submerged nearby streets, while vehicles gathered on a bridge that remained above the floodwaters.

State media said rainfall records were broken in parts of Zhejiang, Henan and Hubei provinces.
Wugang recorded 209.5 millimetres of rain, breaking its August single-day rainfall record, while Xiangyang received 169.1 millimetres.

China has faced increasingly destructive weather, with scientists linking more frequent and intense typhoons to climate change and an emerging El Niño pattern.

Provinces in eastern China have been inundated with heavy rain and flooding caused by Typhoon Dolphin, the strongest storm to make landfall in China this year.

Typhoon Dolphin struck eastern China, including Shanghai, with winds up to 150 kilometres per hour (93 miles per hour), forcing more than one million people to evacuate their homes. The storm has disrupted flights and other transport while bringing heavy rain, flooding and the risk of landslides across the region.

Typhoon Dolphin made landfall near Yuhuan in Zhejiang province at about ⁠5:30 pm (0930 GMT), China’s meteorological authorities said. It brought maximum sustained winds of 94mph (151 km/h) near its centre at landfall, equivalent to a category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Dolphin originally grew out of a tropical depression on July 26, moving at 45km/h (30mph) over the open waters of the Central Pacific Ocean as it embarked on a journey of several thousand kilometres.

Heavy rainfall over the past several days has triggered severe flooding and prompted emergency response operations across parts of Jiangxi Province in eastern China and Hunan Province in central China.

Authorities in Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province, issued a red alert for heavy rain—the highest level in China's four-tier weather warning system—after more than 100 millimetres of rainfall fell within three hours in urban districts of Jingdezhen and southern areas of Fuliang County. The downpour caused widespread waterlogging, prompting local authorities to mobilize personnel and equipment to drain floodwaters from affected areas, Caliber.Az reports, citing foreign media.

According to the Fuliang County Meteorological Bureau, the county recorded heavy to torrential rainfall with average precipitation reaching 75 millimetres. The intense rainfall led to significant flooding on several road sections in the county seat.

Guangdong province in southern China, with a population of more than 127 million people, was hit by heavy rains, with 60.9 cm of rain falling in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, in April. The water level at the Bay River, Feilaixia Reservoir in Qingyuan exceeded the 50-year maximum, and at the Feilaixia hydroelectric power station, it approached the 100-year maximum. In neighboring Guangxi, west of Guangdong province, strong hurricane-force winds swept through the region, destroying buildings.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, 4 people (three residents and a rescuer) were killed, 10 were missing, and about 110 thousand people were evacuated. Across the province, 36 houses collapsed and 48 were seriously damaged.

Major rivers, waterways, and reservoirs in China’s Guangdong province threaten to unleash dangerous floods, forcing the government to enact emergency response plans to protect more than 127 million people.

Calling the situation “grim,” local weather officials said sections of rivers and tributaries at the Xijiang and Beijiang river basins are hitting water levels in a rare spike that only has a one-in-50 chance of happening in any given year, the state broadcaster CCTV news said on Sunday.

China’s water resource ministry issued an emergency advisory, CCTV reported.

Data showed 2,609 hydrological stations with daily rainfall greater than 50mm (1.97in), accounting for about 59% of all observation stations. At 8 am on Sunday, 27 hydrological stations in Guangdong were on alert.

In neighboring Guangxi, west of Guangdong, violent hurricane-like winds whipped the region, destroying buildings, state media video footage showed. Some places have also experienced hailstones and major flooding, CCTV said.

At 10 am, 65 landslides were recorded in Hezhou, located in Guangxi, state media reported.

A 12-hour stretch of heavy rain, starting from 8 pm (1200 GMT) on Saturday, battered the central and northern parts of the province in the cities of Zhaoqing, Shaoguan, Qingyuan, and Jiangmen.

According to state media, almost 20,000 people have been evacuated from Qingyuan, and some power facilities in Zhaoqing were damaged, cutting power to some places.

According to local media, officials in Qingyuan also suspended classes in kindergartens and primary and secondary schools.

“Please look at Zhaoqing’s Huaiji County, which has become a water town. The elderly and children in the countryside don’t know what to do with power outages and no signal,” said one user on the popular social media site Weibo.

This summer, China was hit hard by the East Asian monsoon. By the end of July, flood warnings had been issued for 433 rivers, thousands of homes and businesses had been destroyed, and millions were at risk of losing their homes. Water levels in Lake Poyang, China's largest freshwater lake, reached a record 22.6 meters, prompting authorities in the eastern province of Jiangxi (population 45 million) to impose "wartime" measures.

In China, due to severe floods, the ancient city of Fenghuang in Hunan province, which is considered one of the most beautiful in the country, was flooded.

More than 50 thousand city residents were forced to leave their homes due to the rampant nature.

The Three Gorges Dam was put into operation.
The construction of the Three Gorges Dam helped solve the problem of recurring floods.

The Three Gorges Dam has proven effective during an unusually wet summer, holding back much of the resulting flood water and thereby minimizing the impact of downstream flooding. However, the dam still had to open its floodgates to relieve the high volume of water in the reservoir, and floods and landslides in the Yangtze basin killed several hundred people and caused significant property damage.

The Yangtze overflowed its banks. The death toll was almost 4 thousand people. But if the behavior of the Yangtze could be at least somehow predicted, then the Yellow River was more difficult to keep track of. Because of its unpredictability, the Chinese in ancient times considered it the most “capricious” river in the Celestial Empire. After a series of floods, they began to call it “The Sorrow of China.”

More than three thousand people died, 15 million became homeless, and economic losses reached $24 billion. Recognizing the political importance of the floods, the Chinese government has rushed to introduce new measures (from infrastructure investments to land use reforms) to prevent such disasters from happening again.

The Yangtze overflowed its banks, which led to irreparable consequences. As a result of the natural disaster, about 30 thousand people died.

The government deliberately caused a flood on the Yellow River by destroying a dam to prevent Japanese troops from advancing inland.

In the evening, water entered the Grand Canal and washed away the dams. About 200,000 people drowned that night, most of them asleep.

Due to the huge number of corpses in the region, epidemics of cholera and typhoid began; due to famine caused by lack of food, cases of infanticide and cannibalism were recorded.

According to various sources, from 145 thousand to 4 million people died. It is considered the largest natural disaster in recorded human history.

The water level was 16 meters higher than normal.

Showers continued into the summer, peaking in July and August.
There was also unprecedented cyclone activity: in July of that year alone, nine cyclones passed through the region, while the norm is two cyclones per year.

South-Central China has been hit by a series of devastating floods.

By July, the country's largest rivers, the Yangtze, Huaihe, and Yellow Rivers, overflowed their banks. Soon, high water reached Nanjing, which was the country's capital at that time, and almost destroyed it.

The winter of 1930/1931 was snowy.
There was a lot of rain in the spring, and the rivers began to overflow.

From 1928 to 1930, China experienced drought.

Floods on the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) in central and eastern China occurred periodically and frequently, causing significant property destruction and loss of life. Among them is the flood of 1870.