Rescue underway for trapped in landslide

Eight out of 14 people trapped due to a landslide in a village of Baiyun district in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, were rescued and immediately sent to the hospital by Wednesday evening, according to local emergency management authorities.

However, one of the rescued people died later due to injuries.

Due to continuous heavy rainfall, the landslide occurred around 8:30 am in Dayuan village, which is in the northern mountainous part of Guangzhou, and damaged houses, authorities said in a news release on Wednesday.

Efforts were underway to locate and rescue the remaining trapped individuals, while on-site rescue workers said the risk of secondary disasters posed significant challenges to their rescue efforts.

Tens of meters away from the landslide site, occasional falling of soil from the mountain was still seen, according to rescue workers.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 996 residents around the core area of the landslide site had been evacuated, according to Tan Huasheng, a member of the Party working committee of Dayuan subdistrict.

Local authorities have arranged two hotels as evacuation shelters for residents, with efforts underway to thoroughly inspect nearby mountain slopes.

Prolonged heavy rainfall has hit most parts of Guangdong, with roads, railways and flights greatly affected over the past few days.

As of Wednesday morning, 75,752 people had been evacuated to safety in Guangdong, according to local emergency management authorities.

According to local hydrological authorities, the average rainfall in the province was 56.6 millimeters from 8 am on Tuesday to 8 am on Wednesday, while heavy rainfall was mainly concentrated in the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan and Qingyuan.

Across the province, 23 rivers and 26 hydrological stations exceeded the warning level, hydrological authorities said.

Due to the prolonged and accumulated rainfall, local hydrological authorities issued a total of 74 flood warning alerts between Tuesday and Wednesday.

From Wednesday to Thursday, several rivers in Guangdong were expected to experience a rise in their water levels of approximately 2 to 6 meters. In some areas, water levels at certain monitoring stations may still exceed the alert levels.

According to monitoring data from local ecological and agricultural meteorological authorities, Guangzhou experienced the most intense rainfall of this year from Saturday to Wednesday, posing a particularly severe impact.

The latest round of rainfall was considered the strongest rainfall in Guangzhou in August and the fifth-strongest since the beginning of the century, according to the Guangzhou Ecological and Agricultural Meteorological Center.

The current round of heavy rainfall was expected to end on Thursday, according to local meteo-rological service authorities.

As the rain belt in Guangdong started to move northward on Wednesday, the impact on railway transportation gradually diminished, according to China Railway Guangzhou Group.

To effectively meet the travel needs of passengers during the summer travel rush, the railway group has resumed train services while conducting comprehensive inspections to ensure the safety and stability of rail infrastructure.

Starting on Wednesday, regular-speed trains on lines between Beijing, Guangzhou and Kowloon in Hong Kong, as well as trains on the Hangzhou-Shen-zhen high-speed railway, Guangzhou-Shen-zhen intercity railway and several other routes have gradually resumed operation.

Due to days of heavy rainfall in South China, thousands of passengers taking high-speed trains to Guangdong had been stranded recently at some railway stations in Hunan province.

On Wednesday, the railway group organized one high-speed special train and arranged two other trains, safely and in an orderly manner transferring an estimated 1,462 stranded passengers from Chenzhou in Hunan to Guangzhou.

As of Wednesday, the group had operated 20 high-speed special trains to transfer over 30,000 passengers over the past several days, mostly from Chenzhou, Changsha, Hengyang and Leiyang in Hunan.

qiuquanlin@chinadaily.com.cn