Typhoon Saudel mudslide kills three in Jiangxi; nine still missing in Mingkeng

The death toll from a mudslide in Mingkeng village, Gaoping town, Suichuan county, rose to three on Sunday, China Central Television reported, after rescuers found another body at noon. Nine people remained missing. The slope failed at about 4 a.m. on Saturday after days of rain from Typhoon Saudel, damaging about a dozen houses in the Ji'an prefecture of Jiangxi province.

County flood-control officials said two residents were pulled out alive on Saturday and were stable. The first firefighters reached the village at 11 a.m. that day by walking a mountain detour, because the access road had gone. They brought life detectors, drones and sniffer dogs. By 10 p.m. Saturday, 641 searchers were on site. Thirty-nine villagers from Mingkeng itself had been moved. More than 5,300 people in neighbouring settlements were taken to safer ground. Roads inside the village were mostly open again by Sunday, power and phone service had returned, and local authorities said water, food and temporary beds were in place.

Jiangxi's disaster committee issued a Level-III provincial emergency response at noon on Saturday. By 4 p.m. that day, emergency managers said Saudel had affected 183,600 people in the province and caused 343 million yuan, about $51.1 million, in direct economic losses. An earlier Xinhua tally on Saturday night put the affected population at about 161,500, a figure that rose as more counties reported in.

Saudel is not a one-landfall storm. It came ashore twice in Zhejiang on 28 August and a third time as a tropical storm in Fujian on 3 September, Xinhua said. The rain then sat over inland ranges. CCTV separately reported two deaths in Hunan from downpours tied to the same cyclone, without giving a precise cause beyond landslides and related damage. The Associated Press treated the Hunan deaths as a separate line from the Suichuan slide.

Mingkeng sits in steep country. A 4 a.m. failure after several nights of rain is the classic pattern for a weathered slope that has taken more water than the soil can hold. The fact that firefighters had to walk in tells the rest: the road that would have carried machines was itself a casualty. Life detectors and dogs are what you send when the wreckage is houses, not a single concrete slab. Nine missing after three confirmed dead means the search is still a body-recovery problem as much as a rescue.

Relocation numbers in the thousands can look large against three deaths. They are the correct scale for a typhoon that has already crossed three provinces. Secondary slides are the risk the county named in its own briefings. Once a slope has moved, the next rainfall can move the neighbour. That is why 5,300 people were taken out of adjacent ground before Sunday's rain-free window was taken for granted.

The money figure, 343 million yuan, will grow if farmland and county roads are added to the house list. For a single inland county it is already a budget event. The provincial Level-III order releases a defined set of funds and units. Whether that is enough for nine missing people under a Saturday hillside is the question the search teams were still answering on Sunday afternoon.