President Xi Jinping says situation “extremely severe” after city of Zhengzhou saw a year’s worth of rain in just three days.
Twelve people were killed in the underground rail system of Zhengzhou as torrential rain lashed China’s central province of Henan forcing tens of thousands to evacuate their homes and leaving a dam at risk of collapse.
Images shared on social media on Tuesday showed passengers up to their necks in water and clinging to the handrails inside a carriage on Zhengzhou’s subway. Other passengers filmed videos of the water rising in the tunnels outside the carriage windows
The provincial capital of more than 10 million people had “experienced a series of rare and heavy rainstorms, causing water to accumulate in Zhengzhou metro”, city officials said in a Weibo post on Wednesday, saying 12 people had died and five were injured.
“The water reached my chest,” a survivor wrote on social media. “I was really scared, but the most terrifying thing was not the water, but the increasingly diminishing air supply in the carriage.”
Storms have battered Henan province since the weekend in an unusually active rainy season that has caused rivers to burst their banks, flooding the streets of a dozen cities and upending the daily lives of millions of people.
Weather authorities in Zhengzhou, nearly 700 kilometres (431 miles) southeast of Beijing, say the rainfall was the highest since record-keeping began 60 years ago with the city seeing the kind of rain it usually gets in a year in just three days.
Some 617.1 millimetres (24.3 inches) of rain fell on Zhengzhou in that time, compared with the city’s annual average of 640.8 mm (25.2 inches).
The amount of rainfall was seen only “once in a thousand years”, local media cited meteorologists as saying
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