A landslide that swept away a section of highway killed 48 people in Guangdong province (southeast China). This region has been experiencing intense rains for a month, which Chinese officials link to climate change. Two of the four lanes of the road collapsed near the city of Meizhou shortly after 2 a.m. on Wednesday, May 1, the first day of China’s Labor Day holiday.
Around twenty cars were swept away. “Most of the vehicles were buried in the flow. They were covered with a large volume of earth”, explained Wen Yongdeng, the Communist Party secretary of the Meizhou Emergency Bureau. Rescue efforts were complicated by continued rains and the possibility of further landslides.
The region around Meizhou has experienced 56 centimeters of rain in the last four weeks, more than four times the levels recorded in 2023. Guangdong, the industrial heartland and most populous province of China with 127 million inhabitants, has been suffering since the At the start of April, record rainfall led to flooding, killing four people the week of April 22 and forcing authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of homes.
“High levels of humidity in the air”
On Sunday April 28, a few days before this landslide, a tornado killed five people, injured 33 other people and affected 140 buildings in the provincial capital, Canton. In June 2022, this same region recorded its heaviest rains in sixty years.
The director of forecasts at the National Meteorological Center, Ma Xuekan, explained to the official press at the end of April that warming was one of the causes of heavy precipitation in the half of the country located south of the Yangzi River. “Seasonally high temperatures have led to high levels of humidity in the air, which causes unstable weather situations that can create sudden and highly destructive weather conditions such as thunderstorms, hail, strong winds and intense precipitation »detailed Mr. Ma.
The head of hydrological forecasts at the Ministry of Water Resources, Yin Zhijie, also spoke of the role of climate change in this situation which has become recurring. “Flood data from recent years shows that extreme precipitation events occur every year, while the trend of increasing temperatures intensifies under the impact of global warming”he declared, according to the China Daily.
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