Twenty people have died due to heavy rainfall in Beijing, Chinese state media has reported, as a relentless downpour stretched into a fourth day.
Another 27 people were missing as of 6am on Tuesday (10pm BST on Monday), the state broadcaster CCTV reported, after Typhoon Doksuri brought heavy rain and widespread flooding to northern China.
A Beijing flood storage reservoir was used for the first time since it was built 25 years ago as rivers swelled to dangerous levels. China’s capital city sealed off more than 100 mountain roads and evacuated more than 52,000 people from their homes.
The city government said the rainfall over the past few days has exceeded records from a severe storm in July 2012 when Beijing was hit by the strongest storm since the founding of modern China.
Doksuri, one of the strongest storms to hit China in years, weakened as it rolled inland, but authorities said risks of further floods and other geological disasters remained.
Beijing recorded an average of 260mm (10.2 inches) of rainfall from Saturday to early Monday, with the Changping Wangjiayuan reservoir logging the largest reading at 738.3mm. In July, Beijing’s wettest month, average rainfall is normally around 150mm-180mm.
South of Beijing, in Hebei province, precipitation from Saturday to Monday recorded by one local weather station amounted to 1,003mm for the three-day period. Precipitation in the county where the station is located averages 605mm a year.
Videos posted on social media showed the extreme impact of the flooding and the creative rescue methods. In Fangshan, a flood-hit district in south-west Beijing, a man identified by local media as Liu Bing drove his forklift through gushing mudflows to lift a man, woman, child and dog to safety. According to Liu’s wife, he had used the same method to rescue people during heavy rainfall in 2012.
Several subway lines in the capital, including trains in western suburbs, were suspended on Tuesday. Beijing’s Mentougou district in the west had experienced dramatic damage the previous day, after torrential rains turned roads into rivers, sweeping cars away, and snapping bridges in half “like a matchstick”, according to one commenter on WeChat.
A military unit of 26 soldiers and four helicopters launched an “airdrop rescue mission” in the early hours of Tuesday to deliver hundreds of food packages and ponchos to people stranded in and around a train station in Mentougou.
In Fengtai, a district nearer the centre of Beijing, Yu Yang, a lieutenant colonel in the armed police corps, told local media that 15,000 sandbags had been used to reinforce road barriers, as the Yongding River burst its banks and hurled detritus across busy intersections. Yu said that 200 soldiers and officers had been despatched to assist with the operation.
“On 31 July, areas in Beijing including Fangshan and Mentougou suffered serious damage from water, causing three trains to get trapped on their routes, and road traffic in some areas was completely cut off,” CCTV reported.
The broadcaster was running live images on Tuesday morning of a row of buses half submerged in flood water in the south-west neighbourhood of Fangshan.
On Tuesday, the local government and Communist party officials in Mentougou published a joint letter, which read: “Floods can destroy our cities, but they cannot destroy our strong determination to overcome disasters”.
Hebei authorities have opened flood storage and diversion areas to manage flooding risks in the Hai River basin, where five rivers converge in a region nearly the size of Great Britain.
Doksuri swept through coastal Fujian last week, taking a 14.8bn yuan (£1.6bn) direct economic toll on the south-eastern province and affecting almost 2.7 million people. Almost 562,000 have been evacuated from their homes and more than 18,000 houses have been destroyed, state media reported.
The country is already preparing for the arrival of another typhoon – Khanun, the sixth such storm of the year – as it nears China’s east coast.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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