Disastrous Floods in China
Early December, 1931- The Last few months we have seen catastrophic floods in China have caused astronomical damage to the countryside. Reports from china that hundreds of thousand of people have died, but some from America have stated that it's possible 2 million+ people have died. This all started in the winter of 1930, where the winter left large amounts of snow and ice in the neighboring mountains. This made some flooding when it melted, but when 9 cyclones in the Spring and Summer, it made everything much worse. Weather reports form China reported around 24 in of rain. This rain was going into the Yangtze and Huai rivers and flooding their banks. The rain combined with the snow and ice from the Mountains flooded the Chinese farmland. The Chinese farmland the water flooded was the Yangtze basin and part of the bigger North China Plain. The plains around these rivers are part of an alluvial plain and the largest in China. These plains were transformed into huge parts of farmland that disrupted the annual flooding of the rivers. Since the plains were alluvial plains, and farming altered the river flooding, it was extremely susceptible to flooding. The floods have caused massive damage and massive amounts of grain have been destroyed, and will lead to starvation. The size of the area of the flooding is estimated to be around 180,000 km2. Combined with the huge amount of homes destroyed, this will take years to recover. The government first tried to issue bonds but that didn't work. But thankfully, the government got many donations from around the world and hundreds of thousands of workers are trying to rebuild the 2,000 km's of dikes destroyed in the flood. Hopefully they can recover faster than expected.
A town street being flooded completely.
People rebuilding the broken dikes.
A diagram showing some of the staggering stats about the floods.