Typhoon Saudel's rain kills four in Jiangxi and leaves ten missing

Rescue crews in Suichuan county, Jiangxi, were still digging on 7 September after two landslides tied to Typhoon Saudel. A mudslide at about 4 a.m. on Saturday in Mingkeng village killed three people and left nine missing. A later slide in Yangfen village killed one person and left one missing. That is four confirmed dead and ten unaccounted for in one county.

Hu Wenfeng, the deputy county head, said a first inspection in Mingkeng found 12 houses damaged, eight of them destroyed. By 10 p.m. Saturday, 641 rescuers were on site. They moved 39 residents out. Roads and communications in the village were largely restored, he said, and water, power, food and beds had been arranged.

Saudel was the 18th named typhoon of the year. It made a third landfall in Zhangpu county, Fujian, on Thursday morning, then fell apart as a numbered storm. The National Meteorological Center stopped numbering it on 4 September. The rain did not stop.

What the rain measured

Putian, in Fujian, recorded 416.5 millimetres in 24 hours from Thursday into Friday. Nearby villages recorded more than 500 millimetres. In Fujian, authorities said almost 600,000 people were evacuated from flood-prone ground. An embankment near Xihu village in Huating town, Putian, overtopped and breached on Thursday. About 100 houses went down. Local figures said 1,261 people were relocated in Chengxiang district, with 30 shelters open, and 171 people from 52 households left Xihu village.

From 6 a.m. Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday, 74 hydrological stations on 50 rivers in eight Fujian cities, including Sanming, Fuzhou and Quanzhou, rose above warning levels. By the next morning 18 stations on 13 rivers in six cities were still above the line.

In Wenzhou, Zhejiang, more than 2,500 teachers and students were trapped in a school compound on Wednesday when low ground flooded. In Fuding, firefighters waded waist-deep water to carry older residents out. A three-storey house came down in Jinxi village.

Jiangxi's provincial count

Jiangxi emergency officials said that by 4 p.m. Sunday Saudel had affected 250,300 people in 10 cities and 62 county-level areas. Direct losses were put at 452 million yuan, about $67 million. Officials said 8,350 people were evacuated as a precaution and 14,600 had been relocated. A Guardian weather desk tally put 128,000 people affected in 53 Jiangxi counties, with 9,000 moved in emergency lifts. The provincial bulletin is the firmer pair of numbers.

Saudel was the seventh typhoon to hit China this year. The numbering ended. The secondary hazards did not. Mountain counties in southwest Jiangxi sat in the Ministry of Water Resources' heavy-rain window through Friday. Suichuan is one of those counties. Monday's work there is still a search, not a rebuild.

The sequence a reader can keep is short. Third landfall at Zhangpu on Thursday. Embanksment failure at Putian. School compound isolated in Wenzhou. Numbering dropped on Friday. Mingkeng at 4 a.m. Saturday. Yangfen on Sunday. Four dead, ten missing, 641 people on one hillside. The storm name is finished. The mud is not.