[The heaviest rainfall on record in Zhengzhou, a city of
five million people, trapped passengers inside the city’s subway system.]
In Zhengzhou’s subway system,
floodwaters breached a retaining wall near an entrance to Line 5, which makes a
loop around the city center, China News reported. The water poured into the
system between the Shakou Road and Haitan Temple stations around 6 p.m. on
Tuesday.
Trapped passengers posted videos
showing water rising to their chests or necks. In one video, water surged
outside the subway car’s windows. Other photographs and videos — some later
apparently removed by censors — showed several lifeless bodies on a subway
platform at the Shakou Road stop.
“It’s like making a horror movie,
my goodness,” one man trapped in a subway car could be heard saying in one
video.
The death and destruction in and
around Zhengzhou, a city of five million along the Yellow River, seems certain
to add to the
grim global toll extreme weather has taken already this year.
Researchers have said climate change is causing the scorching heat in the Pacific
Northwest, forest fires in Siberia,
and flooding in Germany and
Belgium.
In a sign of the potential severity
of the disaster, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ordered the authorities to give
top priority to people’s safety, Xinhua, the state-run news agency, said in a
report that described “heavy casualties and property losses.” Mr. Xi called the
flooding “very severe” and warned that some dams had been damaged even as
rivers exceeded alert levels.
It was not immediately clear how
many people had been trapped in the city’s subway, which began operating in
2013 and now has seven lines and 148 stations. The state news media said 500
people were evacuated and that those who had been trapped had been moved to
safety.
The entire system remained closed
on Wednesday morning.
Flooding is routine in China, and
the Communist Party government has made strides to try to tame the country’s
volatile rivers and streams, but the risks appear to have become more severe,
overwhelming drainage systems and rescue efforts and posing a test to the
leadership. Last summer, China battled
weeks of flooding along the Yangtze River that killed hundreds of
people and displaced millions more. The rains at that time filled the Three
Gorges Dam to its highest level since it opened in 2003.
The government often goes to great
lengths to manage information about disasters, limiting news coverage and
censoring blogs and social media sites over concerns about public
dissatisfaction with prevention and rescue efforts. Already, some people on
Chinese chat platforms and social media sites have raised questions about whether official news outlets
in Zhengzhou and Henan Province initially downplayed the flood in the subway
system.
In times of disaster, the country’s
state news media often focuses on the efforts of rescue workers, including the
military, while playing down the causes of disasters and their damage. A
journalism professor, Zhan Jiang, posted a
note on Weibo, the social media platform, complaining that a television station
in Henan Province continued to show its regular programming instead of
providing public safety information.
In Zhengzhou, torrential rain began
on Sunday and continued into Wednesday. It was the heaviest on record in the
city, according to China’s state television network, CCTV.
At one point, the city saw nearly
eight inches of rain in one hour. In one day, the region recorded roughly the
average annual rainfall. More than 140,000 people had to be evacuated, the
reports said.
The downpour flooded roads and
railways and disrupted operations at the airport, CCTV reported. A passenger
train carrying 735 people came to a stop near Zhengzhou for more than 40 hours
and had run out of food and water. Aerial photographs showed scores of cars all
but covered by muddy water, the fate of their drivers and passengers unknown.
Videos circulating online showed
cars and even people being swept away. At least one hospital, First Affiliated
Hospital of Zhengzhou University, was reported to be inundated with floodwater,
losing electricity and jeopardizing patients being treated or monitored with
electrical medical devices.
Flooding was also reported in
several cities near Zhengzhou, where people posted pleas for help on WeChat and
Weibo, two of the country’s biggest social networks. In Gongyi, at least 20,000
people were displaced by floodwaters that inundated scores of homes and washed
away roads, according to reports.
Claire Fu, Li You, Liu
Yi and Albee Zhang contributed research.