Four people went missing after a tailing well in Chenzhou City in central China's Hunan Province collapsed during a heavy mountain flood Monday midnight.
Rescuers are still evacuating people downstream from the flood while searching for the missing.
Lingering rainfall has battered the province since Nov. 11. Chenzhou received the heaviest rain on Monday with precipitation reaching 334.4 mm.
The local environment department has sent staff to monitor pollution resulting from tin mine tailing flooding.
Continuous rainstorms have caused the largest floods ever witnessed in the Xiangjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze. As of Tuesday morning, the rare winter flooding had affected a total of 404,000 people in Hunan.
About 13,400 residents had been relocated as floods damaged 25,000 hectares of farmland in the province, resulting in direct economic losses of 600 million yuan (about 94.2 million U.S. dollars).
