Heavy rains battered northern China yesterday, killing at least two people in Beijing while washing away cars and forcing the capital to issue its highest alerts for flooding and landslides.
Storm Doksuri, a former super typhoon, has swept northwards over China since Friday, when it hit southern Fujian province after scything through the Philippines.
Emergency personnel recovered two bodies from waterways in Beijing’s Mentougou district yesterday, the state-run People’s Daily said.
AFP reporters saw tree branches and dented cars, left by receding floodwaters, strewn on riverbanks in Mentougou yesterday afternoon.
“This morning it was crazy, the water overflowed the Mentougou river and the whole avenue was flooded,” Guo Zhenyu, a 49-year-old resident, said.
Yellow bulldozers, workers in orange mackintoshes and residents cleared away the mud and debris during a period of lighter rain yesterday afternoon.
“I’m old but I’ve never seen flooding like this before in my life,” Mentougou resident Qin Quan said.
She showed a video on her phone, shared among residents of the area, of workers attempting to resuscitate an unconscious man, as well as footage of a man desperately clinging to a pole with one hand as water washes over him.
The much larger and still swollen Yongding River in the same district churned up debris in brown torrents as residents looked on in shock from a bridge. Other footage shared by a Mentougou resident showed a traffic barrier dozens of metres long snaking down a road as the water carried it away.
Chen Hong, a resident of the southern Fengtai district, shared footage that showed a parked van half-submerged in fast-flowing brown water yesterday morning as the rain continued to fall.