Six dead as floods inundate vast swath of India, Bangladesh and China

Six dead as floods inundate vast swath of India, Bangladesh and China

by AFP Staff Writers

Guwahati, India (AFP) July 3, 2024

Six people have been killed in floods precipitated by torrential rains across northeast India and neighbouring Bangladesh that inundated the homes of more than a million others, officials said Wednesday.

Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but experts say climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.

Disaster authorities in India’s northeastern state of Assam said four people had died over the past day, bringing the number of people killed there over successive downpours since mid-May to 38.

In Bangladesh, landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains killed two people including a Rohingya refugee early on Wednesday, police commander Jahirul Hoque Bhuiyan told AFP.

Bhuiyan said authorities in Bangladesh’s vast relief camps — home to around a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar — had relocated some inhabitants to safety.

The worst flooding took place in northeastern Sylhet division, where top government bureaucrat Abu Ahmed Siddique said more than 1.3 million people had been affected.

“Their villages and roads and most of their homes have been inundated by flood water,” Abu Ahmed Siddique, the government administrator of Sylhet region, told AFP.

Kamrul Hasan, the secretary of Bangladesh’s disaster management ministry, said that rivers had swelled after rain upstream in India.

Much of low-lying Bangladesh is made up of deltas as the Himalayan rivers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra slowly wind towards the sea after coursing through India.

Hasan told AFP that hundreds of relief shelters had been opened around Sylhet for those forced out of their homes by flood waters.

– ‘Higher ground’ –

India’s weather department has issued alerts for Assam and neighbouring states warning of the risk of more flash floods.

Flood waters have damaged roads in the state, and the airforce rescued 13 fishermen stranded on an island.

A major portion of the Kaziranga national park, a UNESCO world heritage site and home to the highest number of one-horned rhinos in the world, has also been flooded.

“Forest guards have been put on alert,” park official Arun Vignesh told AFP. “Hundreds of animals have started crossing the highway in search of higher ground”.

The summer monsoon brings South Asia 70-80 percent of its annual rainfall, as well as death and destruction due to flooding and landslides.

The rainfall is hard to forecast and varies considerably, but scientists say climate change is making the monsoon stronger and more erratic.

Last week, at least 14 people were killed after rains triggered landslides, lightning and flooding in Nepal.

In Bangladesh, at least nine people died in a landslide in June.

The same month, six people were killed in flash floods and landslides in Sikkim, an Indian state in the Himalayan foothills bordering China.

240,000 people evacuated in China rainstorms
Beijing (AFP) July 3, 2024 -
Nearly a quarter of a million people were evacuated in eastern China as rainstorms lashed swathes of the country and caused the Yangtze and other rivers to swell, state media reported Wednesday.

China has been enduring extreme weather conditions in recent months, from torrential rainfall to searing heat waves.

The country is the leading emitter of greenhouse gases, which scientists say drive climate change and make extreme weather events more frequent and intense.

State news agency Xinhua said the storms had affected 991,000 residents in Anhui province and forced the evacuation of 242,000 people by Tuesday afternoon.

“As of 4 pm Tuesday, rainstorms had wreaked havoc in 36 counties and districts in seven prefecture-level cities in Anhui,” Xinhua reported, citing the provincial emergency-management department.

It said the Yangtze, China’s longest river, has seen water levels in its Anhui section exceed warning marks and continue to rise.

Torrential rains have also pushed waters above their alert levels in another 20 rivers and six lakes in the province.

Footage on state broadcaster CCTV Wednesday showed a section of the Yangtze rising high enough to nearly cover a sculpture in the city of Wuhu that typically stands about 12 metres above the water line.

Images showed umbrella-carrying volunteers in red jackets patrolling the river’s edge and stockpiling bright red lifejackets and lifebuoys on the shore.

More than 100 millimetres of rainfall was recorded at hundreds of weather stations across Anhui between 5 pm on Monday and the same time Tuesday, according to Xinhua.

In Hexi county, near the provincial capital of Hefei, about 266 millimetres was recorded.

Tens of thousands of officials have been deployed to monitor dams and dykes along the Yangtze in Anhui, Xinhua said.

The provincial weather office forecast more rain across swathes of Anhui from Wednesday until Friday and issued warnings for “geological disasters” in southern areas.

Intense rainfall has triggered deadly disasters in southern China in recent months.

Mountain floods in central Hunan claimed five lives last month, according to state media reports, while a landslide in the same province killed eight people.

Heavy rains and flooding also left 38 dead in southern Guangdong province in June.