As rainstorms continue to raid much of China. Having brought a full day of downpours in Southwestern China, the rain clouds will move north to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze river in the next three days.
Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and parts of central north China will also see rain spells through Wednesday. Xinjiang has put up a blue rainstorm alert. And Yunnan province has done the same. Still recovering from the past few weeks of torrential rain, Yunnan has also put up warnings for secondary disasters including land-slides, floods and water logging.
To help cope with the aftermath of the storms, the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters has dispatched nine work groups to heavy-hit areas.
Pinzheng, a county in Guangxi, witnessed record-level rainfall over the weekend. As rain clouds finally cleared, residents started to take stock of their losses. Having to ditch all the water-logged ice-cream, Li Gui's family business lost some 200 thousand yuan to the flood.
"My father-in-law says that even he has never seen floods on this scale. It's the biggest in history. You can see how high the water has risen," said Li Gui.
Many have fallen victim to this bout of extreme weather, which came in different guises, across the country.
In Dingxi, Gansu province, it's a record-setting drought that's affecting 26.7 square kilometers of crops.
"It's an extreme case of drought. Rainfall from last July to now has been the lowest in history," said Li Qiaozhen from Dingxi, Gansu.
Li said that even if rain comes along soon, the batch of summer crops would suffer. And experts with the meteorological authorities say El Nino is to blame.
"What we've seen so far is closely related to El Nino. El Nino in China always comes with floods in the South and droughts in the North. The worrisome weather came from uneven rainfall in the two regions," said Zhu Dingzhen from China Meteorological Administration.
And the meteorological department forecasts that more extreme weather could come in the next few weeks.
