Eight people died and one person went missing after thunderstorms and tornadoes hit China’s Hubei province on Monday night while two people were killed in flooding caused by Typhoon Maysak in the southern region of Guangxi.
A landslide at a village in northwestern China buried 33 people on Tuesday, state media reported. Authorities said it occurred in the Nanhe township of Longnan city in Gansu province shortly before 7am.
State broadcaster CCTV said 17 people were already rescued, but it did not elaborate on their condition. While rescue operations were underway, authorities relocated affected residents. It was unclear what caused the landslide.
In Hubei, the storms struck the cities of Huangshi, Huanggang, Ezhou, and Xianning, with local authorities reporting tornadoes in some areas. Rescue operations were underway, emergency management authorities said.
The storms came on the heels of widespread flooding in Guangxi brought by the passage of Maysak, which made landfall as China’s first typhoon of the year.
In Guangxi, around 55,000 people were already affected by flooding in Nanning, the regional capital, where waters were overflowing or breaking through barriers at three reservoirs, deputy mayor Wei Jiang said late on Monday.
A reservoir wall subsequently broke, sending a torrent of water through the area.
Authorities raised the flood control emergency response to its highest level due to "extremely heavy rain" that they warned could make the situation worse and hamper rescue efforts. Across the wider Guangxi region, 480,000 people were evacuated, officials said.
Footage posted on the social media platform Douyin showed widespread flooding and destruction. In Guigang, some 270km from Nanning, floodwaters turned a wide road into a lake, submerging cars and cascading in brown torrents down a hill into a building site.
In Fangchenggang, further south, a small car was swept down a street by floodwaters, with a man seen struggling to keep his electric scooter from being carried away. The water inside another vehicle rose to the level of its steering wheel as it was engulfed by the surge.
Authorities warned that torrential rains would continue across Guangxi and neighbouring provinces in the coming days, with forecasters saying that the situation could deteriorate further as more rain fell on already saturated ground and swollen rivers.
China was also bracing for Super Typhoon Bavi, which caused catastrophic damage on the US island of Rota on Monday, where it made landfall with wind gusts of up to 180 miles per hour, and was tracking westward across the Pacific towards the Philippines and potentially Taiwan.
Chinese weather authorities warned that Bavi would bring strong winds and heavy rain to eastern China from Thursday, Xinhua reported.
The double threat of Maysak's aftermath and Bavi's approach led authorities to put large parts of southern and eastern China on high alert.
China regularly experiences severe flooding during the summer monsoon season but the combination of two active typhoon systems in close succession is stretching emergency response capacity across multiple provinces simultaneously.
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