Monday 16 August 2010

horrendous numbers in anyones language !

It is incredible difficult to gather correct data coming out of China re the massive floods and mudslides .... but the following is from Wikipedia:

The 2010 China floods began in early May 2010. 392 people had died, and a further 232 people had been reported missing as of June 30, 2010, including 57 people in a landslide in Guizhou. 53 of the deaths occurred from the flooding and landslides between May 31 and June 3, and 266 deaths occurred between June 13 and June 29. 

424 people were killed by the end of June, including 42 from the Guizhou landslide; 277 more were killed and 147 left missing in the first two weeks of July, bringing the death toll as of August 5 to 1,072

A landslide in early August in Gansu killed at least 1,239 people and left 505 missing. More than 305 million people in 28 provinces, municipalities and regions, especially the southern and central provinces and regions of Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Chongqing Municipality, Gansu, Sichuan and Guizhou, and the northeastern province of Jilin have been affected, while at least 4.66 million people have been evacuated because of the risk of flooding and landslides in the latter half of June. 

By early August, over 12 million people had been evacuated.

Millions lack drinking water. A total of 1.36 million houses have been destroyed and more than 97,200 square kilometers (24 million acres) of crops had been innundated, while 800,000 ha (2,000,000 acres) of farmland had been completely destroyed by the end of June. Dozens of rivers remain in flood, including the Pearl River in Guangdong province, which was impacted by severe drought during the spring as its outflow was severely reduced. The total damages from the floods were roughly 83.8 billion yuan as of June 27, 2010, and over 275 billion yuan (41 billion USD) by August 8. By early August, 13.5 million hectares of farmland have been affected by the flooding, while 2.09 million hectares have been completely destroyed.

In late May 2010, heavy rainfall caused a train derailment in Jiangxi, killing at least 19 people, and the closure of the Shanghai-Kunming railway line for 24 hours due to a landslide.

Many major rivers in China, including the Yangtze, Yellow and Songhua Rivers have been flooded to danger levels. The Chinese Government has allocated over 2.1 billion yuan for rescue and relief work. The Jialing River, Han River and Huai River have also surged higher than warning levels.
in the Guangxi Autonomous Region alone - 34.96 million people were affected, 37 deaths, 164.58 thousand hectares of crops affected, 16,395 residential housings collapsed. The direct economic loss is about 24.0543 million yuan, of which 10.2081 million were agricultural losses.

This is beyond my comprehension, you need to take a look at Wikipedia and read these figures for yourself .... as I have run out of fingers and toes!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Horrendous numbers indeed!
Thanks for this informative post.

Best wishes to you from Boonsong