Woman watches her grandmother be swept away by mudslide in China

At least three people have died and two are still missing following a mudslide in Jiangxi, eastern China.

Days of torrential rain dumped by Typhoon Saudel caused an avalanche that engulfed villages in Suichuan County around 4am yesterday.

Footage posted to the Chinese social media network Weibo shows floodwaters dragging a building down a cliff in Gaoping as a woman screams as her grandmother was swept away.

One missing person was found in the ruins of a building in Mingkeng this morning but showed no signs of life, China Central Television reported.

Officials said at a press conference yesterday that the wave of mud and floodwater destroyed 12 homes in Shixia, Mingkeng and Gaoping.

‘Even the river in front of our house, which is so deep, has swelled up like this, washing away vegetable gardens, chicken coops, and roads,’ one local said, according to the China Observer.

‘We just hope the rain will stop soon.’

Another added: ‘Some schools are already submerged in the floodwaters and have lost water and electricity.’

Officials added that power has since been restored to the area, with 640 search and rescue team workers now combing the area.

Some 5,300 more people have been evacuated in the county as Saudel, the seventh typhoon to hit China this year so far, progresses westwards.

In the city of Putian, floods inundated main highways, damaged bridges and devastated residential buildings on Saturday.

Another avalanche struck yesterday in the northwestern Xinjiang province, after a glacier burst at Muztagh Ata, a peak near the border with Tajikistan.

No one has been injured or property damaged in the flood, which took place in an unpopulated remote area away from any major roads.

The mountain, some 7,546 metres high. was already closed to the public because of fears of glacial activity, with tourists warned by the local culture bureau not to journey to the peak.

The typhoon is thought to have been exacerbated by the El Niño effect, which has seen the Western Pacific subtropical ridge unusually high, pushing storms towards China’s east coast.

Hui Su, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, warned that Typhoon season, which normally abates in October to November, could stretch as far as December this year.

‘This typhoon season, we tend to see stronger typhoons form towards the east and they travel long distances and they get much stronger when they actually reach land, like in China or like the southern part of Asia’, he said.

Some 5,600 people are unaccounted for following the glacier flood on the border of Nepal and Tibet.

As of Sunday, an estimated 1,300 have died following the disaster, with 43 people confirmed dead and 519 missing on the Chinese side, Xinhua News Agency reported.

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