At least 10 people have been killed and a village has been partially submerged in two separate Chinese cities as record-breaking levels of rainfall inundated the country.
Around 1.8 million people have been affected by flooding in the central Chinese province of Hunan — including those who lost their lives, three missing and 286,000 evacuated to safety — since the beginning of June.
ABC reports that more than 2,700 houses have also been damaged or collapsed entirely as the largely rural mountainous province continued to record historic levels of rainfall at monitoring stations, the Xinhua News Agency said on Wednesday.
In the southern Guangxi region, a landslide buried part of a village.
State media reported that rescue crews on Thursday were still looking for survivors in Xinfeng township, where days of rain left hillsides waterlogged and prone to slippages.
One woman was confirmed killed in the landslide and another was pulled out alive.
Authorities issued warnings for continued heavy downpours in Guangxi and the nearby provinces of Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Sichuan, Chongqing and Yunnan.
Regular fatal flooding
China regularly experiences flooding during the summer months, most frequently in the central and southern areas that tend to receive the most rainfall.
Its worst floods in recent years were in 1998, when more than 2,000 people died and almost 3 million homes were destroyed, mostly along the Yangtze, China’s mightiest river.
Last year, 300 people lost their lives after record downpours dumped a year’s worth of rain on Zhengzhou in the central part of the country in just three days.