"Extremely severe" floods due to torrential rains, according to Chinese President Xi Jinping himself, caused at least 16 deaths,
most in the subway of a large city in the center of the country.
About 200,000 people have been evacuated in Zhengzhou, where the scenes of chaos in this city of 10 million people, located 700 km south of Beijing, sowed grave concern.
Images released on social media showed
subway passengers with water up to their necks in a wagon, clinging to the handles.
A passenger told the Weibo network that the lifeguards opened the roof of his car to take out the passengers, one by one.
Other images show a passenger sitting on the roof of his car half submerged by water in a tunnel.
The army was called in to reinforce relief efforts in the capital of the populous Henan province, which
has received the equivalent of a year of rain in three days.
The city "experienced a series of rare and violent storms, causing an accumulation of water in the Zhengzhou subway," city authorities explained in a message on the Weibo social network.
Authorities
declared Zhengzhou on a red alert on Tuesday
, the highest level of risk for weather in China.
The emergency services decreed a level 2 alert throughout the country due to the floods.
National CCTV television showed city streets flooded by water, while residents pushed their vehicles into flooded arteries.
According to local authorities,
more than 36,000 city residents were affected by the disaster.
The authorities closed the subway, flooded, and suspended hundreds of flights at the city's airport.
The Zhengzhou Meteorological Services announced that
it is the highest rainfall since data began to be collected 60 years ago.
According to the People's Daily, these rains have caused houses to collapse.
At least one person has died and two others are missing.
The local press also reported the death of two other people after a wall fell.
President Xi urged mobilization in the face of inclement weather.
"Dams have sunk, causing serious injuries, deaths and damage.
The situation due to the floods is extremely serious," he
said, according to national television.
The eye is also on the
20-meter gap in the wall of the Yihetan dam
in Luoyang, a city of 7 million people, in the Henan region, which "can be broken at any time," the army warned. .
The military had planned to carry out an emergency operation that includes dynamiting and diverting floodwaters to avoid a catastrophe.
Seasonal rains cause floods in China every year.
But
the threat has grown in recent years
, due to the construction of dams or diversions of the riverbed that have often cut the existing connections between the rivers and the adjacent lakes.
Last year, unprecedented flooding in the southwest of the country damaged roads and led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents.
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