Dozens killed, hundreds of thousands displaced as China floods
By Associated Press
5:08pm Jun 12, 2020
Heavy rains have continued to batter southern China, causing riverbanks to burst, inundating homes and flooding farmlands, state media reported.
More than a dozen people have been killed in the floods since they started on June 2.
The central Chinese metropolis of Chongqing was hit hard on Thursday, triggering a level three emergency flood response.
Millions have been affected by the heavy rains in Guangxi, Hunan, Chongqing, and other southern provinces, and hundreds of thousands have been evacuated since the flooding started.
Floodwaters surround a village in Yangshuo in Guilin in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Some residents have been killed by flooding in a wide swath of central and southern China. (AP/AAP)
Over a thousand houses have collapsed, state media reported, and property damage due to the rains have been estimated at over 4 billion RMB (565.5 million US dollars).
Rescue crews have been deployed across the country to save people from flooded homes and take them to temporary shelters.
Seasonal flooding generally causes heavy damage each year in the lower regions of China's major river systems, particularly those of the Yangtze and the Pearl to the south.
A young boy is carried to a boat by rescuers during an evacuation of a flooded village in Qingyuan in southern China's Guangdong province. (AP/AAP)
Authorities have sought to mitigate the hardship by using dams, particularly the massive Three Gorges structure on the Yangtze.
Vans and cars are washed down a street in China. (Twitter)
China's worst floods in recent years were in 1998, when more than 2,000 people died and almost three million homes were destroyed.
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