Monsoon peaks in south China, unleashing landslides and disease
Forecasters warned of more thunderstorms after the second-heaviest August rains this century pounded Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, forcing Baiyun airport—one of the world's busiest—to cancel 363 flights and delay 311.
The day before, skies above Hong Kong and the high-tech cities of China's Pearl River Delta turned livid and dumped the heaviest August rainfall since 1884 on the Asian financial center.
Rescue crews in Guangdong scrambled to open drains and pump water away from urban areas, state media said, as the intense rain set off mudslides and felled trees on highways, tearing away road surfaces to expose cabling and other infrastructure.
Video images showed roads transformed into brown waterways, threatening to worsen a major outbreak of Chikungunya, fueled by mosquitoes thriving in stagnant flood water. The outbreak had been on a downtrend before the latest rains.
Guangdong had reported more than 7,000 virus infections earlier.
China has endured weeks of atmospheric chaos since July, battered by downpours heavier than usual as the East Asian monsoon stalled over both the north and south.
Weather experts link the shifting pattern to climate change, testing officials as flash floods displace thousands and threaten billions of dollars in economic losses.
On Tuesday, Beijing allocated more than 1 billion yuan (USD 139 million) in disaster relief for Guangdong, the northern province of Hebei, the capital Beijing, and the northern region of Inner Mongolia, according to state news agency Xinhua. The aid includes subsidies for damage to grain-growing areas.
Extreme rainfall swept at least five people to their deaths in Guangdong over the weekend, triggering a large-scale search effort by more than 1,300 rescuers.
Sixteen rivers across Guangdong are threatening to breach their banks, with water levels at two sites reaching their highest since 2017 and 2018.
The worst may be yet to come, with two to three typhoons expected to strike in August, emergency management authorities warned Tuesday.
Disease outbreak
The city of Foshan, west of Guangzhou, has been the epicenter of the province's Chikungunya outbreak, while at least a dozen other locations have reported infections. The disease typically causes fever and severe joint pain, though deaths are rare.
The next few weeks are especially daunting for disease prevention and control, say provincial authorities, as the flood season—worsened by typhoons and heavy rain—has boosted mosquito activity.
Spread by the bite of infected Aedes mosquitoes, global infections of the disease number at least 240,000 this year.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Arab News
4 hours ago
- Arab News
Third-hottest July on record wreaks climate havoc
PARIS: The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures, but many regions were devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday. Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month. "Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. "But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world." As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era. 2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels. That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive. "We continued to witness the effect of a warming world in events such as extreme heatwaves and catastrophic floods in July," Buontempo said. Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and -- for the first time -- Turkiye, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan. In Spain, more than a thousand deaths were attributed by a public institute to the heat in July, half as many as in the same period in 2024. The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: the burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy. "Unless we rapidly stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said. Global average temperatures are calculated using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and the data used by Copernicus extends back to 1940. Even if July was milder in some places than in previous years, 11 countries experienced their hottest July in at least a half-century, including China, Japan, North Korea, Tajikistan, Bhutan, Brunei and Malaysia, according to AFP calculations. In Europe, Nordic countries saw an unprecedented string of hot days, including more than 20 days above 30C across Finland. More than half of the land in Europe and along the Mediterranean basin experienced the worst drought conditions in the first three weeks of July since monitoring began in 2012, according to an AFP analysis of data from the European Drought Observatory (EDO). In contrast, temperatures were below normal in North and South America, India and parts of Australia and Africa, as well as in Antarctica. Last month was also the third-hottest July on record for sea surface temperatures. Locally, however, several ocean records for July were broken: in the Norwegian Sea, in parts of the North Sea, in the North Atlantic west of France and Britain. The extent of Arctic sea ice was 10 percent below average, the second lowest for a July in 47 years of satellite observations, virtually tied with the readings of 2012 and 2021. Diminishing sea ice is a concern not because it adds to sea levels, but because it replaces the snow and ice that reflect almost all the Sun's energy back into space with deep blue ocean, which absorbs it. Ninety percent of the excess heat generated by global warming is absorbed by the oceans. In Antarctica, sea ice extent is the third lowest on record for this month. "Human activities are causing the world to warm at an unprecedented rate," Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds, told AFP in commenting on the new data. On top of the human-driven warming, he explained, there are year-to-year changes caused by natural phenomena, such as the El Nino -- a shift in wind patterns across the southern Pacific -- and volcanic activity that helped push global temperatures past the 1.5C threshold over the last two years. "These variations are now reducing, dropping us back from the record-breaking temperatures," said Forster, who heads a consortium of 60 top scientists that track core changes in Earth's climate system. "But the reprieve is only temporary," he added. "We can expect the the high records to be broken again in the near future."
Al Arabiya
4 hours ago
- Al Arabiya
Deadly Indian Himalayan flood likely caused by glacier collapse: Experts
A deadly wall of muddy water that swept away an Indian Himalayan town this week was likely caused by a rapidly melting glacier exacerbated by the rising effects of climate change, experts said on Thursday. Scores of people are missing after water and debris tore down a narrow mountain valley, smashing into the town of Dharali in Uttarakhand state on Tuesday. Several people could be seen in videos running before being engulfed as waves uprooted entire buildings, leaving others smothered in freezing sludge. At least four people have been confirmed killed, with around 50 others still missing. Government officials initially said the flood was caused by an intense 'cloudburst' of rain. However, experts assessing the damage suggested that was only the final trigger, following days of prolonged rainfall that had already soaked and loosened the terrain. P.K. Joshi, an expert on Himalayan hazards at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, said it appeared the flood was caused by the collapse of debris — known as moraine — that had dammed a lake of meltwater from a retreating glacier. 'Given the persistent rainfall over preceding days and the sudden discharge observed, a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) or collapse of a moraine-dammed lake is suspected as the primary trigger,' Joshi told AFP. That would have contributed to a 'sudden high-energy flash flood,' he said, noting that glacial terrain upstream of the town included 'unstable sediment zones.' Cloud cover has obstructed satellite imagery to confirm the source of the debris, and Joshi cautioned that there is not yet enough satellite data for a definitive conclusion. Safi Ahsan Rizvi, an adviser to the National Disaster Management Authority, also said it was 'likely' that the cause was a 'glacio-fluvial debris landslide.' Sandip Tanu Mandal, a glaciologist at New Delhi's Mobius Foundation, also pointed to the 'possibility of a GLOF,' caused by 'significant water accumulation in the lake due to increased melting and rainfall.' Mandal noted that while the rainfall was heavy, it was 'not very significant' compared to the vast volume of water that poured down the valley — suggesting a potentially collapsing glacial lake as the main cause. Himalayan glaciers, which provide critical water to nearly two billion people, are melting faster than ever due to climate change, exposing downstream communities to unpredictable and increasingly costly disasters. The softening of permafrost is also raising the risk of landslides. Joshi said the latest disaster 'highlights the complex and interconnected nature of Himalayan hazards.' Rapid development downstream, he added, had magnified the destruction. 'The land use patterns in the floodplain exacerbated the disaster severity,' Joshi said.
Arab News
4 hours ago
- Arab News
Helicopters rescue people stranded by floods on key India pilgrim route
BHATWADI, India: Indian rescuers used helicopters on Thursday to pluck to safety people stranded by flood waters in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, two days after a sudden inundation and landslide killed four people, with more still missing. With roads cleared as rain eased, rescue teams arrived in Dharali, where Tuesday's wall of water had submerged in sludge homes and cars in the village on the route to the Hindu pilgrim town of Gangotri. Helicopters were carrying to safety those who had been stranded, the state's chief minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, said in a post on X. Dhami said the destruction was 'massive' and that the number of missing persons was still being estimated. 'If the weather supports us then we will bring every single person by tomorrow,' he told Reuters, referring to rescue efforts. Authorities said about 400 people stuck in Gangotri were being rescued by air, with nine army personnel and seven civilians among the missing. Relatives of missing people gathered at the helicopter base at Matli village, desperately searching for their loved ones. Mandeep Panwar said he wanted to reach Dharali, where his brother ran a hotel and is among those missing since Tuesday. 'If you see the videos, ours was the first hotel to be hit by the deluge. I have not heard from my brother and he has been missing since,' Panwar said. Communication links with rescuers and residents remained disrupted, as mobile telephone and electricity towers swept away by the floods have yet to be replaced, officials said. Earlier, army rescuers used their hands, as well as machinery, to shift boulders from roads turned into muddy, gushing rivers, visuals showed. More than 225 army personnel were drafted into the rescue, their Northern Command said on X. 'We saw Dharali falling before our eyes,' said Anamika Mehra, a pilgrim headed for Gangotri when the flooding hit. The hamlet of about 200 people in the state's Uttarkashi district stands more than 1,150 meters (3,775 feet) above sea level on the climb to the temple town. Uttarakhand is prone to floods and landslides, which some experts blame on climate change.
