China floods: Mother dies after saving baby from mudslide as death toll rises to 51
A four-month old baby was rescued from under a collapsed building that killed her mother as authorities desperately searched for life among the flood debris in central China.
The death toll from freak rainfall that submerged swathes of the Henan province rose to 51 as tales of heroism emerged while people continued to search for missing relatives for a fourth day.
The baby girl was found in a rural village trapped under the rubble of a home. The sound of crying alerted rescuers as they had just arrived, a family member told Chinese state media. Her mother, however, was found dead.
Elsewhere, six people formed a human chain to pull a drowning woman to safety, and scores of volunteers rushed in from other parts of the country to help with the recovery effort and distribute supplies.
Not everyone has been so fortunate.
A woman surnamed Xu, 24, is still searching for her 14-year-old brother after losing contact with him on Tuesday afternoon as sheets of rain began pitching down.
“I haven’t been able to sleep at all because I can’t get in touch with him,” she told The Telegraph. Days later, she and her family are beginning to fear the worst.
“He likes playing basketball whenever he doesn’t have school,” she said. “We never talked about death; it’s something he probably never even thought about.”
The floods – affecting 4,010 square kilometers (1,550 square miles) – have been catastrophic in Henan province, destroying homes, causing landslides in rural mountainous areas, stranding young children at school and sending vehicles floating far away.
More than 395,000 people have been evacuated from the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, authorities said. In total, millions have been impacted by the storms that continue to drench the region.
Zhengzhou, a city of 12 million, is still struggling to fully restore power after being inundated with as much rain in just a few days as it would normally get on average a year.
A number of rivers in Henan have also hit record water levels as a result, with thousands of villages remaining under threat of landslides from loosened dirt, said state media.
Zhengzhou is China’s bread basket, home to numerous food crops including barley and millet. More than 215,200 hectares of crops have been damaged, equivalent to an economic loss of about 1.22 billion yuan (£137 million), according to state media.
The city is also a major production hub for factories that supply Apple, though the plants have largely been able to continue operating.
Chinese authorities have cast the extreme weather as a black swan event that couldn’t be helped, without linking it to climate change.
China is the world's largest carbon emitter, making it a major cause of global warming that has led to surprise weather events from sandstorms to heavy rains in recent years. But that also means linking current devastation to climate change could open up the government to public criticism that it failed to do enough on the environmental front to prevent catastrophe.
Local weather forecasters also were reportedly caught by surprise, originally expecting the storms to arrive a bit later.
But by Thursday, Chinese state media was already deflecting blame away from the authorities by claiming the public had ignored weather alerts supposedly issued by forecasters.
Additional reporting by Wen Xu
