After Years Of Warnings And Official Inaction, China Taking Frantic Action To Address Another Deadly Summer Of Floods
Three years after Zhengzhou was hit with China’s deadliest flash floods in decades, the central Chinese city was underwater once again. For over three hours on Monday afternoon, 9.21 inches of rain was dumped on this city of 13 million — and forced an all-out effort to prevent a repeat of 2021, when 300 died in a sudden deluge that flooded the subway and trapped people in submerged cars.
This time, local authorities weren’t taking chances. They canceled buses, closed tourist sites and warned residents to stay home. Water pumps were deployed to prevent underpasses flooding. Subway entrances were barricaded with sandbags and metal sheeting. China’s summer has begun with a massive emergency response effort in multiple provinces to prevent extreme weather, now routine, from turning into a political and humanitarian crisis for the ruling Communist Party.
After last year’s record-breaking heat waves, June brought drought, floods and typhoons — sometimes quickly coming one after the other. Extreme heat delayed crop planting in eastern Shandong province weeks before it was hit with floods. After decades of campaigning by climate activists that were largely ignored, Beijing has made adapting to bouts of extreme weather a greater policy priority. Last week, weather officials issued an unusually direct warning about the country’s vulnerability to intensifying heat and rainfall worsened by climate change.
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Forecasts for the rest of July underscore a sense of urgency: Torrential rain is expected in 18 regions across the country. The government has sent in hundreds of soldiers, relocated tens of thousands of villagers, and allocated $200 million to aid disaster relief. Some of the worst flooding this year has been in Hunan province along the middle stretch of the Yangtze river. There, four towns in Pingjiang county were evacuated Tuesday. A 740-foot breach in the dikes of China’s second-largest freshwater lake over the weekend has reignited debate about farmland and industrialization encroaching on wetland that is better at absorbing rainfall.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/09/china-floods-climate-change/
https://wapo.st/3XVM26R
= new reply since forum marked as read
Or not but I was required to give that info to see the article.
Not surprised either.
