BEIJING, April 23, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - More than 100,000 people have been 
evacuated due to heavy rain and fatal floods in southern China, with the 
government issuing its highest-level rainstorm warning for the affected area 
on Tuesday.

Torrential rains have lashed Guangdong in recent days, swelling rivers and 
raising fears of severe flooding that state media said could be of the sort 
only "seen around once a century".

On Tuesday, the megacity of Shenzhen was among the areas experiencing "heavy 
to very heavy downpours", the city's meteorological observatory said, adding 
the risk of flash floods was "very high".

It later downgraded its weather warning as the storms weakened, but urged 
residents to remain vigilant against disasters.

Images from Qingyuan -- a city in northern Guangdong that is part of the low-
lying Pearl River Delta -- showed a building almost completely submerged in a 
flooded park next to a river.

Official media reported Sunday that more than 45,000 people had been 
evacuated from Qingyuan, which straddles the Bei River tributary.

State news agency Xinhua said 110,000 residents across Guangdong had been 
relocated since the downpours started over the weekend.

The floods have claimed the lives of four people so far and 10 are missing, 
according to state media.

- Ship sinks -

In Foshan, a city in the centre of the province, a further four people were 
missing after a ship struck a bridge in an incident that "may have been... 
due to the influence of flooding", Xinhua reported Tuesday, citing local 
authorities.

The vessel, which was carrying nearly 5,000 tonnes of rolled steel, smacked 
into a pillar of the Jiujiang Bridge on Monday evening, catapulting several 
of its 11 crew members into the water.

Seven people were rescued before the ship sank just before midnight, Xinhua 
said.

Aerial shots from Guangdong showed brown gashes in the side of a hill -- the 
aftermath of landslides that had occurred behind a town on the banks of a 
swollen river.

Soldiers could be seen operating excavators in an attempt to clear away the 
muddy debris produced by the downpour. 

Climate change driven by human-emitted greenhouse gases makes extreme weather 
events more frequent and intense, and China is the world's biggest emitter.

Parts of Guangdong have not seen such severe flooding so early in the year 
since records began in 1954, the state-run China National Radio reported.

Yin Zhijie, the chief hydrology forecaster at the Ministry of Water 
Resources, told the broadcaster that "intensifying climate change" had raised 
the likelihood of the kind of heavy rains not typically seen until June or 
July.

"In recent years, extreme weather events that overturn our traditional ways 
of thinking have occurred frequently, and the extremeness (and) 
abnormality... of floods and droughts have significantly increased," he was 
reported as saying.

- 'Take precautions' -

Guangdong is China's manufacturing heartland, home to around 127 million 
people.

"Please quickly take precautions and stay away from dangerous areas such as 
low-lying areas prone to flooding," authorities in Shenzhen said in issuing 
Tuesday's red alert.

"Pay attention to heavy rains and resulting disasters such as waterlogging, 
flash floods, landslides, mudslides, and ground caving in."

Heavy rain is expected to continue in Shenzhen for the next two to three 
hours, authorities said.

In recent years China has been hit by severe floods, grinding droughts and 
record heat.

That has meant that authorities are typically very quick to deploy, making 
casualties much lower than in previous decades.

Last September Shenzhen experienced the heaviest rains since records began in 
1952, while the nearby semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong saw its heaviest 
rainfall in nearly 140 years.

Asia was the world's most disaster-hit region from climate and weather 
hazards in 2023, the United Nations has said, with floods and storms the 
chief cause of casualties and economic losses.