Landslides slammed into three mountain hamlets in western China early yesterday, killing 17 people and leaving 44 missing, while crews drained an engorged reservoir in another part of the country following heavy rains.
The landslides swept through the rural communities in three different areas before dawn, state media said. In the worst hit town of Xiaohe, Yunnan Province, rescuers searched for 42 people while an additional four were dead and 38 injured, the official provincial newspaper Yunnan Daily said in a report on its Web site.
In Sichuan Province, seven died and one person was still missing in Yandai village. while in Sima village rescuers recovered six bodies and were searching for one person, Xinhua news agency reported.
Meanwhile, waters in a reservoir near Golmud began to subside yesterday after hundreds of workers and soldiers finished digging a diversion channel, an official at the Qinghai Province water bureau said. He refused to be named as is common with Chinese officials.
The reservoir at one point swelled to almost more than a meter above its warning level, the Golmud city government’s Web site said. Over the weekend, about 10,000 residents were evacuated to safety as soldiers transported sandbags, rocks and dirt and used bulldozers to dig the emergency waterway, the Web site said.
Still, parts of Golmud — a transport and mining hub on the edge of the Tibetan plateau — were already under 2m of water, Xinhua reported.
Usually prone to drought, Qinghai has seen increasingly heavier rainfalls in recent years. This year’s rains fell as the snow melted in the surrounding mountains. Dozens of reservoirs swelled beyond their warning levels, the official from the water bureau said.
Heavy rain is expected to sweep through the Yangtze River basin — including Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces — through today, the China Meteorological Administration said.
Torrential rains this month have caused more than 50 deaths and economic losses of 8.9 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion), the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs said.
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