At Least 154 Dead in China Flooding; More Than 100 Still Missing

Associated Press
Published: July 23,2016
At least 154 people have died and 124 are left missing in northern China due to some of the region's worst flooding in years, officials said Saturday. The deluge was triggered by torrential rain that led to landslides and destroyed homes across the country.
A majority of the fatalities were reported in the northern province of Hebei. The provincial Department of Civil Affairs announced 114 people had been killed and 111 others were missing. In the city of Xingtai, 25 people were killed and another 13 were missing.

The Xingtai village of Daxian was swamped by a flash flood early Wednesday as residents were asleep. Eight people, including three children, were killed and another was missing in the flood, according to the Xingtai government.

Friday, accounts, purportedly by local residents, began surfacing on Chinese social media of angry villagers blocking roads, accusing the local authorities of failing to notify them in time for evacuation when an upstream reservoir discharged the floodwaters.

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Authorities blamed extraordinary rainfall and a failure of a river levee near the village for the sudden water surge. Local media reported that the river channel is particularly narrow near the village of Daxian and has been blocked by pipes from a heating utility, as well as mud.

Qiu Wenshuang, a vice mayor of Xingtai, said Saturday that the flood was sudden and that the village was already flooded when officials arrived there to evacuate residents on Wednesday morning, according to state media reports.

Beijing has been hit by constant rain since Tuesday of last week, which has forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and trains and flooded city streets.
Tens of thousands have been evacuated from flood-hit areas and direct economic losses have risen into the hundreds of millions of dollars. President Xi Jinping on Wednesday warned the country to be prepared for more hardship to come and said officials found negligent in their duties would be severely punished.
China's south has also been hit by floods that strike annually during the monsoon season that began in May, but this rainy season has been particularly wet. Water levels in some major rivers have exceeded those of 1998, when the worst floods in recent years killed 4,150 people, most of them along the Yangtze River, China's mightiest.
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