City roads are flooded on June 17 as heavy downpour continues to pound the city under the influence of a plum rain belt.(Photo/Shanghai Daily)
arts of Shanghai and east China's Jiangsu Province have been submerged under water after heavy downpours that started on Tuesday.
More than 20 roads in the city are covered by 10 to 20 centimeters of floodwater and a dozen residential areas are in five to ten centimeters as precipitation in parts of the city exceeded 200 millimeters on Wednesday.
"I was awakened by the sound of rain last night. It was hard for me to reach work this morning, since the road in front of my house is like a river," a Shanghai resident surnamed Xu said,
The cities of Nanjing, Changzhou, Wuxi and Suzhou in the nearby Jiangsu Province have also been flooded by the rains, with floodwater in Wuxi and Suzhou reaching 70 and 50 centimeters respectively.
A netizen in Wuxi posted online a picture of people fishing on a flooded road.
Government departments of those cities are working to drain away the floodwater.
Heavy rains have been battering areas along the Yangtze River, including the provinces of Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu and the cities of Chongqing and Shanghai since Tuesday.
Flood-control headquarters in Hubei said on Wednesday that water levels in several lakes and around 400 reservoirs have exceeded warning levels.
The downpours have affected 798,000 people and caused an economic loss of 680 million yuan (111.2 million U.S. dollars) to the province.
The National Meteorological Center issued a rainstorm warning on Wednesday morning, forecasting that heavy rains will continue hitting parts of Hubei, Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Guizhou provinces, as well as Shanghai on Thursday.
