Home>News Center>China | ||
More downpours to drench country
More heavy or torrential rain will drench the country in the next two or three days, the Central Meteorological Observatory predicted Thursday.
In Beijing, which has seen frequent downpours since July, heavy rain fell early Thursday morning, causing traffic congestion in some places. Majialou bridge in southwestern Beijing was among the problem areas. Traffic was blocked for hours, Xinhua reported Thursday.
Flooding also occurred in some other parts of the city, stopping people from making it to work. Near the Shuangjing bridge along the east Third Ring Road, the rain caused a cave-in at a construction site, which brought down a telegraph pole fall. The incident caused power cuts to about 600 families who were living in the vicinity. Earlier this month, China's two biggest cities -- Beijing and Shanghai -- were hit by torrential rain and suffered great losses. On the afternoon of July 10, rain caused huge traffic jams throughout Beijing and ruined many cars. The downpour and flooding highlighted the city's poor drainage system. Two days later, a storm hit Shanghai. Although the rain only fell for about an hour, it claimed seven lives and injured more than 20 people.
Floods have claimed 439 lives and injured more than 21,600 in China so far this year, according to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Throughout the nation, landslides caused by flooding have destroyed 275,000 homes and damaged more than 1 million houses, forcing 1.46 million people to flee their homes. And more than 5 million hectares of farmland has been ruined by flooding, mostly in Hunan, Henan and Hubei provinces in Central China and Yunnan Province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in the south. |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||