China summer storm deaths approach 700
Pastor Dale Morgan
China summer storm deaths approach 700*
Reuters
Monday, July 30, 2007; 12:17 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - Deaths from floods, lightning and landslides across
China this summer have reached nearly 700, state media said on Monday,
with experts warning that global warming is likely to fuel more violent
weather.
Over the weekend alone, fierce storms and hail killed 17 people across
four provinces.
Ten died in the central province of Hubei, where rain and hail have
added to swollen waters along the country's longest river, the Yangtze,
and its main tributary, the Han.
In the northwestern province of Shaanxi, five died in floods that cut
off roads around Shangluo, Xinhua news agency said.
A hail storm on Saturday hit parts of the eastern province Anhui, where
millions of residents have been grappling with the threat of the swollen
Huai River for the past month, killing one person and injuring three,
Xinhua said.
Flood waters on the Huai have begun to retreat, but 268,000 people,
including 8,000 troops, remained stationed along its embankments to
prevent any breaches, it added.
One person died in a lightning strike in weekend storms in the
flood-battered southwestern province of Sichuan, Xinhua said.
Summer storms are nothing new in China, but experts said global warming
driven by growing greenhouse gas emissions from factories, farms and
vehicles was fuelling more intense weather.
"The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are increasing --
records for worst-in-a-century rainstorms, droughts and heatwaves are
being broken more often," Dong Wenjie, director-general of the Beijing
Climate Centre, said in an interview on its Web site (www.ncc.cma.gov.cn).
"This in fact is closely associated with global warming."
Global warming is usually associated with drought, but warmer, moister
air is likely to bring more concentrated storms to many parts,
scientists say.
Overall, rain may not become more abundant, chief forecaster of the
China Metereological Administration, Wang Yongguang, told the China Daily.
"Heavy rainfall doesn't increase the total precipitation level because
it is distributed unevenly over time and space," he told the paper.
Floods have affected 119 million people, or nearly one tenth of China's
1.3 billion population, and caused economic losses of 52.5 billion yuan
($7 billion), Xinhua said.
Farmers have borne the brunt of the damage and casualties, underscoring
the vulnerability of the huge rural population to natural disasters.
But coal miners in central China have also become victims of the storms.
Sixty-nine miners in Henan have been trapped since Sunday in a pit
flooded by rainwater that surged through an old shaft, Xinhua reported.
Rescuers have pumped out water and drilled holes to provide oxygen to
the trapped miners.
Forecasters said torrential rain was likely to hit parts of the
southwestern provinces Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan as well as Hubei in
the coming days. Storms could also soak the country's dry north on Monday.
Other parts of China are suffering meteorological misery of different kinds.
More than 1 million people faced shortages of drinking water in several
southern provinces as a heatwave compounded weeks of drought.