BEIJING (Reuters) -Tropical Storm Danas drenched eastern China on Wednesday, triggering flash flood alerts and school closures as it tracked across the country’s high-tech industrial heartland.
Chinese weather authorities urged residents to stay indoors as the storm – which has weakened from a typhoon after claiming two lives in Taiwan – began dumping the water it had sucked up over the South China Sea and blew southwest at winds of around 50 kph (31 mph).
Danas was moving across the provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian towards Jiangxi and Guangdong and is forecast to deposit as much as 300 millimetres of rain in some parts.
Local officials along rivers feeding key ports in the cities of Fuzhou and Xiamen were bracing for rising water levels, China’s state broadcaster CCTV said, while local maritime authorities across the region suspended passenger shipping operations.
Schools in Fuzhou shut on Wednesday, after authorities activated emergency flood and typhoon protocols.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, faces growing threats from extreme weather, which meteorologists link to climate change. The impact each year stands to wipe out tens of billions of dollars worth of commercial activity, as cities flood, shipping activity stalls, and croplands are washed out.
Economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $10 billion last July, when China’s rainy season typically peaks.
Danas has weakened from a typhoon to a tropical storm since making landfall in southern Taiwan on July 6, where it killed two people and injured 630 more in a rare hit to the island’s densely populated west coast.
But its residual vortex could still wreak havoc in southern China, where breakneck urbanisation has encased vast stretches of land in impermeable concrete.
The storm was moving at around 15-20 kph, China’s national weather forecaster said, raising the risk of heavy to even extreme rainfall as the tempest lingers and threatens to overwhelm ageing flood defences, especially in inland provinces.
Heavy rain is expected to persist until at least July 15.
In other parts of China, a subtropical high is steaming the provinces of Anhui, Hubei and Hunan further inland, where temperatures are forecast to remain around 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).
(Reporting by Joe Cash; Editing by Saad Sayeed)
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