SHANGHAI: Flooding in China’s southwest has driven more than 80,000 people from their homes, state media said on Wednesday, as a collapsed bridge forced the dramatic rescue of a truck driver left dangling over the edge.
China is enduring a summer of extremes, with heat waves scorching wide swaths of the country while rainstorms pummel other regions.
Climate change — which scientists say is exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions — is making such weather more frequent and more intense.
Around 80,900 people had been evacuated by Tuesday afternoon in the southwestern province of Guizhou, state news agency Xinhua reported.
“It’s very bad this time,” Xiong Xin, a member of a rescue team who was in Rongjiang county on Tuesday, told AFP, describing the flooding as a “once-in-50-year event”.
Images shared with AFP by Xiong showed a row of shops on the first floor of a building submerged, with residents leaning out of second-floor windows.
In Rongjiang a football field was “submerged under three metres of water”, Xinhua said.
Rescuers pushed boats carrying residents through murky, knee-high water and children waited in a kindergarten as emergency personnel approached them, the footage showed.
One resident in an affected area told Xinhua “the water rose very quickly”.
“I stayed on the third floor waiting for rescue. By the afternoon I had been transferred to safety.”
Footage from state broadcaster CCTV showed severe flooding has inundated villages and collapsed a bridge in one mountainous area of the province.
A team was also seen preparing a drone to deliver supplies including rice to flood victims.
In a video circulated by local media, truck driver You Guochun recounted his harrowing rescue after he ended up perched over the edge of a broken bridge segment.
“A bridge collapsed entirely in front of me,” he said.
“I was terrified.”
China’s top economic planning body has allocated 100 million yuan ($13.95 million) for disaster relief in Guizhou, Xinhua said.
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