12 dead as tornadoes hit China
Print Edition
Back-to-back tornadoes killed 12 people in central and eastern China and left hundreds injured, authorities said.
Eight people died in the inland city of Wuhan on Friday night and four others in the town of Shengze, about 400 kilometers east in Jiangsu province, local governments said on Saturday.
The first tornado struck Shengze about 7pm, damaging homes and factories and knocking out power. The Suzhou city government, which oversees the town, said in a social media post that four people had died and 149 others had minor injuries.
A total of 84 households and 17 companies sustained damage in the disaster, according to Suzhou municipal bureau of emergency management.
Another tornado hit Wuhan at about 8:40pm with winds of 23.9 meters per second, destroying more than two dozen homes and triggering a power outage affecting 26,600 households.
Officials in Wuhan said that eight people had died and 230 were injured.
They said that 28 homes collapsed in Wuhan, another 130 were damaged and put economic losses at 37 million yuan (US$5.7 million), the Hubei Daily newspaper said.
A tower crane was bent to the ground at the site of a domestic waste incineration power generation plant, where a signal tower was also knocked down by the tornado.
Workers’ sheds at the construction site were damaged.
Li Shengchun, a 56-year-old construction worker who witnessed the tornado, said there were more than 60 workers in the three prefabricated houses when the storm tore them down.
“It became stormy and dark all of a sudden. I felt the house shook, and in a few seconds, the second floor collapsed to the ground,” said Li.
Photos showed a swarm of rescuers searching through building debris in Wuhan after midnight on Friday and workers clearing metallic debris at a factory in Shengze in the morning.
Shanghai, 100km from Suzhou, was also hit by powerful thunderstorms, prompting weather officials to declare an alert.
Meanwhile, four people have been injured and over 9,000 residents affected by extreme weather in southwest China’s Guizhou Province.
On Saturday, gales as strong as 44.5 meters per second began to hit Kaiyang County in Guiyang, said local emergency management bureau. More than 800 households had been damaged. The affected area of crops and forests reached 876.5 hectares and 60 hectares, respectively.
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