BEIJING - More than 100,000 people have been evacuated after heavy rain and fatal floods in southern China, with the government issuing its highest-level rainstorm warning for the affected area on April 23.

Torrential rains have lashed Guangdong province in recent days, swelling rivers and raising fears of severe flooding that state media said could be of the sort only “seen around once a century”.

On April 23, the megacity of Shenzhen was among the areas listed as experiencing “heavy to very heavy downpours”, the city’s meteorological observatory said, adding that the risk of flash floods was “very high”.

It later downgraded its weather warning as the storms weakened but urged residents to remain vigilant against disasters.

Images from Qingyuan – a city in northern Guangdong that is part of the low-lying Pearl River Delta – showed a building almost completely submerged in a flooded park next to a river.

Official media reported on April 21 that more than 45,000 people had been evacuated from Qingyuan, which straddles the Bei River tributary.

State news agency Xinhua said 110,000 residents across Guangdong had been relocated since the downpours started over the weekend. Four people have died so far and 10 are missing, according to state media.

In Foshan, a city in the centre of the province, a further four people were missing after a ship struck a bridge in an incident that “may have been... due to the influence of flooding”, Xinhua reported on April 23, citing local authorities.

The vessel, which was carrying nearly 5,000 tons of rolled steel, smacked into a pillar of the Jiujiang Bridge on the evening of April 22, catapulting several of its 11 crew members into the water.

Seven people were rescued before the ship sank just before midnight, Xinhua said.

Aerial shots from Guangdong showed brown gashes on the side of a hill – the aftermath of landslides that occurred behind a town on the banks of a swollen river. Soldiers could be seen operating excavators in an attempt to clear away the muddy debris produced by the downpour.

Climate change driven by human-emitted greenhouse gases makes extreme weather events more frequent and intense, and China is the world’s biggest emitter.

Parts of Guangdong have not seen such severe flooding so early in the year since records began in 1954, the state-run China National Radio reported.

Mr Yin Zhijie, the chief hydrology forecaster at the Ministry of Water Resources, told the broadcaster that “intensifying climate change” had raised the likelihood of the kind of heavy rains not typically seen until June or July.

“In recent years, extreme weather events that overturn our traditional ways of thinking have occurred frequently, and the extremeness (and) abnormality... of floods and droughts have significantly increased,” he was reported as saying.

Guangdong is China’s manufacturing heartland, home to around 127 million people.

“Please quickly take precautions and stay away from dangerous areas such as low-lying areas prone to flooding,” the authorities in Shenzhen said in issuing April 23’s red alert. “Pay attention to heavy rains and resulting disasters such as waterlogging, flash floods, landslides, mudslides, and ground caving in.”

Heavy rain is expected to continue in Shenzhen for the next two to three hours, the authorities said.

In recent years, China has been hit by severe floods, grinding droughts and record heat.

This meant that the authorities are typically very quick to deploy, making casualties much lower than in previous decades.

In September 2023, Shenzhen experienced the heaviest rains since records began in 1952, while the nearby semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong saw its heaviest rainfall in nearly 140 years.

Asia was the world’s most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, the UN has said, with floods and storms the chief cause of casualties and economic losses. AFP