Tornado brings death and devastation to eastern China

Powerful tornado sweeps through eastern China leaving almost 100 dead.

A man stands on debris of his damaged house after a tornado hit Funing county, Yancheng, Jiangsu province, China on June 23, 2016. China Daily/ Reuters

YANCHENG, CHINA // The ferocious wind, black with dust and debris, seemed to descend out of nowhere on to the kindergarten and its 120 pupils.

Within minutes, the powerful tornado and its accompanying rain and hailstorm had scythed through the area of eastern China with merciless force, leaving almost 100 people dead and another 800 injured.

“I was very scared. I had no idea what was happening,” said Guo Haimei, a teacher at the kindergarten.

She and her pupils were among the lucky ones. Although the school was heavily damaged, just seven students were injured, two of them seriously.

One day after the storm, rescuers on Friday continued searching for survivors in this densely populated area of farms and factories on the outskirts of the city of Yancheng in Jiangsu province.

The twister was one of the most extreme weather events witnessed by China in recent years, leaving a swath of destruction with destroyed buildings, smashed trees and upturned vehicles. A solar panel factory was shredded, forcing fire crews to secure toxic materials before they leaked into neighbouring waterways.

As the death toll climbed to 98 on Friday, doctors said most of the 800 injured had broken bones and deep lacerations, especially on the head. Medical crews had been sent to the area, about 800 kilometres south of Beijing.

Rescuers carried injured villagers to ambulances and delivered food and water, while army units cleared roads blocked by trees, downed power lines and other debris. While the weather cleared on Friday, forecasters were warning of the possibility of more heavy rain, hailstorms and even additional twisters.

“The people inside tried to run outside, but the wind was too strong so they couldn’t,” said Xintu villager Wang Shuqing. “My family members were all inside, they all died. The police then came and took the bodies out. I can’t bear it.”

The disaster was declared a national-level emergency, and Chinese president Xi Jinping, who was in Uzbekistan on Thursday, ordered the central government to provide all necessary assistance.

Tents and other emergency supplies were being sent from Beijing, while schools and other facilities were used to shelter survivors, state broadcaster CCTV said.

Cellphone and security camera footage showed the tornado’s debris-blackened funnel touching down and golf-ball size hailstones falling thick as rain. Terrified residents who sought to hold back doors that were subsequently blown away in spoke of a “black wind” that tore the glass from all windows.

Reports said the tornado struck at about 2.30pm and hit hardest in Funing and Sheyang counties on the city’s outskirts, with winds of up to 125 kph. Twisters of that magnitude are considered capable of inflicting moderate damage, but the accompanying hailstorm appeared to have also contributed significantly to the destruction that reduced farm buildings to piles of bricks and tiles.

Tornados occasionally strike southern China during the summer, but rarely with the scale of death and damage caused by the one on Thursday. Last year, a freak wind described as a tornado was blamed partly for causing a cruise ship to capsize in the Yangtze river on June 1, killing 442 people.

Volatile atmospheric conditions over the Yangtze river delta are common in June when warm and cool air currents meet, but further studies are needed to determine why Thursday’s tornado was so fierce, said Ding Yihui, a researcher at the national climate centre of China’s metrological administration.

Global climate change is also seen as a factor in increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, Mr Ding said.

“In the US, there could be as many as a dozen or more tornadoes in a single day, but in China these are more rare and isolated,” he said. “We are able to forecast a severe convective weather, but we aren’t able to forecast the time of the occurrence of a tornado, let alone the severity of a tornado.”

* Associated Press