21 missing after landslide hits SW. China villages
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Twenty-one villagers are missing after a landslide flattened a village in southwest China's Sichuan Province Tuesday morning, the latest in a series of rain-triggered disasters across the country.
About 100,000 cubic meters of rock and mud slid down Ermanshan Mountain near Shuanghe Village, Hanyuan County, Ya'an City, at around 5 a.m. Tuesday, smashing into three scores of brick houses at the foot of the mountain, local officials said.
Armed police combing the rubble saved three survivors -- including a 80-year-old -- and helped thousands of villagers re-locate.
Xinhua reporters saw the ruins of a row of three-story brick houses and part of a normally forest-covered slope of Ermanshan mountain covered by a layer of mud and rocks poised to slide further down.
Heavy rains have pounded large swaths of central and southern China lately, flooding riverside towns, causing landslides and mud flows and raising key rivers to danger levels.
On Monday, a pre-dawn mud flow near the China-Myanmar border in southwest China's Yunnan Province left 11 injured and another 11 missing. The search for the missing -- including a four-year-old Chinese girl and four Myanmar nationals -- continued Tuesday.
The missing were employees of a local hydropower company and their family members, who were sleeping in make-shift tents on the riverbank of the Migu River in Drung-Nu Autonomous County of Gongshan when the disaster occurred, according to an initial investigation.
Rescuers feared that the missing were washed away by the rushing torrents of the Migu River.
The mud flow was due to a lasting rainstorm in the mountainous region since July 25, officials said.
Meanwhile, in central China's Henan Province, rescuers continued to search for 13 people missing three days after a bridge collapsed amid flash floods.
The Yi River Bridge collapsed at about 5 p.m. Saturday in Luanchuan County, Luoyang City, plunging 42 people on it into the rushing waters, a local government spokesman said Tuesday.
Rescuers found 28 bodies and only one survivor.
In its Monday update, the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters said floods this year had left 823 people dead and another 437 missing as of Monday morning.
The direct economic loss had mounted to 154.1 billion yuan, more than double that of previous flood losses incurred in any single year since 2000.
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