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Reuters
31-07-2025
- Climate
- Reuters
Care home residents among at least 60 killed in north China flooding
BEIJING, July 31 (Reuters) - Extreme rains and flooding across northern China have killed 60 people, more than half of them at a care home for the elderly in a suburb of Beijing, which has grappled with its deadliest flood disaster in years. In Beijing, 44 people died over the past week, the city's deputy mayor Xia Linmao said at a press conference on Thursday. At least 31 others were missing in the capital and neighbouring Hebei province, authorities said. Torrential rains began a week ago and peaked around Beijing and surrounding provinces on Monday. In the space of a few days the hilly Miyun district in the northeast of the capital saw rainfall of up to 573.5 mm (22.6 inches). By comparison, the average annual precipitation in Beijing is around 600 mm. Thirty-one people died at a nursing home in Miyun's Taishitun, a town sitting immediately upstream from the Miyun reservoir and about a 90-minute drive from central Beijing. Authorities were alerted about people trapped in the facility early on Monday, but rescue efforts were hampered by torrents of water in the streets, said Miyun's top official, Yu Weiguo. "The town centre where the nursing home was located had been safe for a long time, and was not included in the relocation plan," Yu said during the press conference on Thursday. "This showed that our contingency plan had flaws, and our understanding of extreme weather was inadequate," said Yu, who was teary-eyed and wore black to the briefing. A total of 69 elderly residents were at the nursing home when the floods hit, 55 of them with some form of functional impairment, authorities said. It was not clear if any staff at the home were among the dead. The Miyun reservoir, the largest in China's north, saw record-breaking water levels during the rains, which devastated nearby towns. The Qingshui River, which runs through Taishitun feeding into the reservoir and is normally a small stream, was flowing at 1,500 times its normal volume on Monday morning when the disaster struck, Yu said. The river's peak flow was 2.3 times the previous record set more than a century ago, said Liu Bin, head of Beijing's water authority. In total, more than 300,000 people have been affected by the rain and flooding in Beijing, with more than 24,000 homes, 242 bridges and 756 km (470 miles) of roads damaged, deputy mayor Xia said, citing preliminary figures. In the nearby province of Hebei, 16 people died as a result of the intense rainfall. At least eight were killed in the city of Chengde just outside Beijing, with 18 unaccounted for. The deaths occurred in villages within the Xinglong area of Chengde in Hebei province, state-run Xinhua reported late on Wednesday. It cited local authorities but did not specify when or how the people died. The villages border Miyun, sitting at higher elevations in a valley about 25 km (16 miles) from the Miyun reservoir. In another Hebei village north of the reservoir, a landslide on Monday killed eight people and four were still missing. Meteorologists link an increase in extreme weather events such as torrential rain and heatwaves to climate change. In the summer of 2023, heavy rain killed at least 33 people in Beijing. A decade earlier in July 2012, 79 people died in the city in its deadliest flooding in living memory.
RNZ News
14-07-2025
- Climate
- RNZ News
Moteuka farmer describes the harrowing moment his wife got swept away in floodwaters
Land near the Motueka River remains laden with silt and debris. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi A farmer in the Moteuka Valley has described the harrowing moment his wife got swept away in floodwaters in Nelson-Tasman. Jamie Huvinton and his family lost everything in the extreme rain over the last two weeks, with paddocks, fences and sheds being completely washed away by the currents. Huvinton and his wife were trying to move horses to higher ground during the first deluge two weeks ago when she got swept away. "It was around lunchtime, so just upstream from us was a really big island of gravel in the middle of the river. "The river came and flooded that island, diverted the river straight towards our property, that surrounded our house." Huvinton said the water was rising quickly. "On our front lawn we had my daughter's horses and I said to my wife, we need to move them to higher ground, otherwise we're not going to be able to. "We were walking them through the floodwater and as we're going down, there's like a little dip in our driveway and at that stage, the river was just like a torrent through there, but we had to move the horses. "And as she went through the depth, she slipped in the flood water and got swept away, and there was nothing I could do. "I had to grab the other horse and keep going and the only thing that stopped her from getting completely swept down the river was that she got caught up in the fence." Huvinton said it was an extremely traumatic experience and his wife was significantly bruised. Their home was now yellow-stickered and Huvinton, his wife and two children were staying in a rented bus on their property, as they could not find accommodation suitable for their animals. He said the community had been incredible, turning up at his property with food, skips, a port-a-loo and even diggers to clear mud and debris from around their home. A pear grower in Tasman, Charlton Malcolm, said his orchard next to the Motueka River was facing a mammoth clean-up after two major floods left it inundated with silt, sand and debris. Echodale Orchard in Ngātīmoti was just getting stuck into cleaning up from flooding last month when Friday's deluge hit, causing more extensive damage. "The river came through roughly the same height as the first flood but with a lot more damage because all the trees were gone and the riverbank was weak. It's just completely devastating," Malcolm said. He said the orchard lost about two hectares of its land, and structural repairs could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. "We have about 50,000 to 60,000 pear trees in the orchard all around the five year mark, quite young trees which is good because they should be able to bounce back from the flood, from being hit, but time will tell," he said. "The weather is looking pretty good for the next couple of weeks so we should be able to make headway again in removing the sand and debris hopefully, then we've just got to repair the bank and hopefully there's not another 100-year flood again." Malcolm said growers across the district had been hit hard. "There's plenty of other growers down this river that have been hit a lot harder, in the same sort of situation as us, we're going ahead and cleaning it up. It's going to cost us a fortune really for all of us to clean this up and we're just all hoping that the government will give us funding or support or something to get us through for the next couple of years," he said. The government was assessing where funding might be needed in the region and how best to support it. On 30 June the government classified the floods as a medium-scale adverse event and made up to $100,000 available to support and co-ordinate recovery efforts for flood-affected farmers and growers. The classification also unlocked further support like tax relief, and enabled the Ministry of Social Development to consider Rural Assistance Payments and activating Enhanced Taskforce Green . Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
