China: Violent thunderstorms in the South cause deadly floods

Aerial photo taken on June 13, 2022 above flooded fields and buildings following heavy rains in Rongan, south China's Guangxi region.

AFP-STR

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

Streets transformed into torrents that sweep away everything in their path.

Severe thunderstorms hit southern China again this weekend, killing at least five people in the Guangxi Autonomous Region, as climate change amplifies thunderstorms.

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With our correspondent in Beijing,

It's been more than two weeks since the flood season started in China and the images from central television

the same scenes of desolation: vehicles, buildings... Nothing can resist the force of the waters invading the cities and the countryside more to record torrential rains.

In Guangxi, already marked by the disappearance of two children swept away by the torrent last month, a house collapsed, causing the death of five people.

The autonomous region had not seen this since 1961. Same thing in the provinces of Guangdong, but also Fujian – there too, eight deaths last month linked to bad weather.

Because if it rains a lot in summer in southern and central China, if the Yangtze and its tributaries regularly come out of their beds at this time, with the warming, the rainy season lengthens and redoubles in intensity. .

Thousands of houses destroyed, hundreds of hectares of crops under water... We are already talking about more than 570 million direct economic losses.

And more rain is expected to hit Guizhou, Jiangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces in the coming days.

Authorities are on high alert to prevent a recurrence of the

.

The capital of Henan province had ignored weather warnings.

Some 398 people had lost their lives in the floods.

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