Sunday, May 05, 2024
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Forty-eight people died in Guangdong province after a landslide swept away a section of freeway. Officials say the particularly intense rainfall is linked to climate change.
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A landslide that swept away a section of freeway has claimed 48 lives in Guangdong province (southeast China). This region has endured intense rainfall for the past month, which Chinese officials have linked to climate change. Two of the road’s four lanes collapsed near the town of Meizhou shortly after 2 am on Wednesday, May 1, the first day of China’s Labor Day holiday.
Around 20 cars were swept away. “Most of the vehicles were buried in the flows. They were covered by a large volume of earth,” said Wen Yongdeng, Communist Party secretary for the Meizhou emergency office. Rescue efforts were complicated by the continuous rainfall and the possibility of further landslides.
The region around Meizhou has seen 56 centimeters of rain in the last four weeks, more than four times the level recorded in 2023. Guangdong, China’s industrial heartland and most populous province, with 127 million inhabitants, has been experiencing record rainfall since early April. It has led to flooding that killed four people during the week of April 22, and has forced the authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of homes.
On Sunday, April 28, just a few days before this landslide, a tornado killed five people, injured another 33 and damaged 140 buildings in the provincial capital, Guangzhou. In June 2022, this same region recorded its heaviest rainfall in 60 years.
The director of weather forecasting at the National Meteorological Center, Ma Xuekan, stated to the official press at the end of April that global warming was one of the causes of heavy precipitation in the half of the country south of the Yangtze River. “The unseasonably high temperatures have led to high levels of humidity in the air, which generate unstable weather conditions that can create sudden and highly destructive weather events such as thunderstorms, hail, strong winds and intense precipitation,” Ma said.
The head of hydrologic prediction at the Ministry of Water Resources, Yin Zhijie, also pointed to the role of climate change in these ever-recurring events. “Flood data from recent years show that extreme precipitation is occurring every year, while the trend of rising temperatures is intensifying under the effect of global warming,” he said, according to China Daily.
The El Niño phenomenon, which will come to an end this spring, has also brought significant moisture from the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal to southern China, according to Chinese experts, contributing to the intense rainfall.
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