China faced a third straight day of emergency response on Tuesday, as thunderstorms, a typhoon, and a landslide pushed the death toll to at least 15, with hundreds injured, tens of thousands displaced, and over a dozen still missing.
President Xi Jinping, in a directive relayed by state broadcaster CCTV, ordered rescue teams to “go all out” in the search-and-rescue effort, instructing local governments to prioritize treating the injured, resettling displaced residents, and guarding against so-called secondary disasters, the landslides, dam failures, and disease outbreaks that so often follow in the wake of China’s summer flood season.
The worst of the casualties so far have come out of Hubei province, in central China, where what meteorologists described as “severe convective weather” spawned at least two tornadoes and gale-force winds late Monday.
According to Xinhua, the state news agency, winds reaching roughly 150 kilometers per hour, a level 13 on the extended Beaufort scale, tore through the cities of Huangshi, Huanggang, Ezhou, and Xianning over four hours Monday evening, flipping cars and stripping roofs from buildings.
At least 11 people were killed and 331 injured in the province, Xinhua reported, with one person still missing. The storms damaged roughly 4,800 houses and flattened 22 more outright. In Huanggang’s Huangzhou district alone, three communities absorbed the brunt of the destruction, according to local rescue headquarters.
Forecasters were offering little reprieve. The National Meteorological Center warned that northeastern Hubei should brace for another round of heavy to torrential rain on Tuesday, a forecast echoed for a wide swath of the country, including Guangdong, Hainan, Jilin, Shandong, and Liaoning provinces.
To the south, in the Guangxi region, the culprit was Typhoon Maysak, which dumped torrential rain on the regional capital, Nanning, from Saturday morning through Monday.
By 8 p.m. Monday, water levels in 59 rivers across Guangxi had climbed above warning thresholds, and China’s Ministry of Water Resources upgraded the region’s flood-control emergency response first from Level III to Level II and then, as conditions worsened, to the highest level for the city of Nanning itself.
Dramatic footage aired by CCTV showed a wall of muddy water bursting through the crumbled concrete of a reservoir dam, an image that crystallized the scale of the flooding for viewers across the country.
Officials said at least four people were killed in Guangxi and eight remained missing, while roughly 50,000 residents were evacuated from low-lying and vulnerable villages.
Huang Lu, deputy head of Nanning’s municipal emergency management bureau, told reporters that floodwaters had begun receding by Monday night, though authorities were continuing to issue evacuation warnings for villages at risk of further flooding.
Amid the devastation, one image went briefly, improbably viral: video of villagers in a flooded Guangxi town wading through knee-deep water to catch snakes with nets and bare hands after several hundred reptiles escaped a breeding farm swept away by the floodwaters. The clips racked up well over 100 million views on Chinese social media, a strange note of dark comedy in an otherwise grim disaster.
Rescue crews, some in life vests and helmets, others aboard inflatable boats, fanned out across the flood zone, according to footage aired by state media.
Hundreds of miles to the northwest, in Gansu province, a landslide buried an estimated 33 people early Tuesday morning in a village in Tanchang county, according to CCTV, which did not specify what triggered the collapse.
By Tuesday afternoon, rescuers had located 17 people, though local reports on casualties among those pulled from the debris varied through the day. Local authorities said they were making “every effort” to locate those still trapped while also working to relocate displaced residents and watch for further slides in a region marked, officials noted, by steep valleys and rivers that make it especially prone to flash floods and landslides during the rainy season.
Extreme weather is a near-annual feature of the Chinese summer, when northern regions can bake under scorching heat even as southern and central provinces are lashed by intense rainfall. But scientists have repeatedly warned that a warming planet driven by continued fossil fuel emissions is intensifying both the frequency and severity of these events.
The irony is not lost on policymakers: China remains the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, even as it has become a dominant force in renewable energy and has set a target of carbon neutrality by 2060.
This week’s toll adds to a grim tally. In May, heavy rains across China’s central and southern regions killed at least 22 people, with some areas recording what state media called record-breaking rainfall.
And there may be little time to recover. Forecasters are now tracking Super Typhoon Bavi, churning across the Pacific toward Taiwan and expected to make landfall along China’s eastern coast later this week, a fresh test for a disaster-response system already stretched thin.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
China is being hit from three directions at once: tornadoes in Hubei, typhoon flooding in Guangxi, and a landslide in Gansu, and the death toll (15+, dozens missing) will likely keep climbing as rescue efforts continue.
This isn’t an isolated storm but a pattern of compounding, intensifying disasters, with another typhoon already on the way, a stark reminder of how climate change is raising the stakes for a country still balancing its status as the top emitter with its renewable energy ambitions.
