BEIJING (Reuters) -Extreme weather killed at least eight people in the city of Chengde just outside the Chinese capital Beijing, with 18 still unaccounted for, as heavy rainfall pounded the hilly region over the past week.
The deaths occurred in villages within the Xinglong area of Chengde in Hebei province, state-run Xinhua reported late on Wednesday citing local authorities, without specifying when or how the people died.
Work is still underway to locate those missing, Xinhua said.
Set against mountainous terrain, Chengde was known as a resort town for Qing dynasty emperors to escape Beijing’s heat in the summer centuries ago.
Extreme rains that began last Wednesday have lashed Beijing and surrounding regions, pouring a year’s worth of rain in less than a week in some areas and killing at least 30 in the outskirts of the capital. Twenty eight of those deaths occurred in hilly Miyun district.
The deaths in Chengde occurred in villages which border Miyun and sit about 25 km (16 miles) away from the Miyun reservoir, the largest in China’s north.
The reservoir saw record-breaking inflow and outflow of water, and overall water level and capacity during this round of rainfall which devastated nearby towns.
At its peak on Sunday, up to 6,550 cubic metres of water – about 2.5 Olympic-sized pools – flooded into the reservoir every second, pushing its capacity to a record high of 3.63 billion cubic metres since it was built in 1960.
The villages where eight have died sit on higher elevations in a valley, upstream of the Miyun reservoir.
In another village to the north of the reservoir, a landslide on Monday killed eight people while four remained missing.
Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for Chinese policymakers, with officials partially attributing a slowdown in factory activities to heavy rains and flooding.
(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen and Ryan Woo; Editing by Stephen Coates)
