A flash flood down a mountain in north-west China took away precious lives of three out of seven people who were in danger and trying to outrun it overnight on Thursday, adding to a growing list of casualties from weirdly hostile weather condition happening in the mid of an intensely wet summer. The seven had to crawl to discover a secure ground in a hilly area of Gansu province after a storm warning, but a flash flood caught up with them after midnight, taking away lives from three of them, while two are still not discovered, state media revealed.
A day before, in south-west Sichuan province, seven tourists whilst clicking pictures at a beauty spot in a water conservation area were cursed by death when a surge of water from a dam carried away those people. The deaths are away from isolated in a summer that has brought rare rain records which has also led to intense flooding as warmer temperatures fuel powerful convective weather in the Northern Hemisphere. In another incident, a 27-year-old woman has been not been found since June 30 when a flash flood flooded a campsite, taking away life of her friend, in south-western Guizhou province, state media revealed.
Intense weather has risen to be more often in recent years, raising new terrors about the pace of climate transformation. In 2021, an extremely frigid weather during an ultramarathon, also in Gansu, killed 21 people. Many runners went through hypothermia and wandered off in gale-force winds. Since July, typhoons causing predicaments from the Western Pacific have led to floods to cities from Xiamen in the south to Beijing in the north, adding to the toll of weather-related deaths. On Wednesday, the capital’s death toll from flooding tripled to 33 after Typhoon Doksuri inundated the place with the heaviest downpour to hit the city in 140 years since records started. Beijing recorded 74.48cm of rainfall between the evening of July 29 and the morning of Aug 2 – more than what normally falls in a year.