A dozen people died in a flooded subway line in Zhengzhou, the capital of China's central Henan province, after the city was drenched by what weather watchers said were the heaviest rains for 1,000 years.Eight people killed in Pakistan as the first spell of monsoon lashed most parts of the country bringing much-wanted respite from heat and shortage of water in reservoirs but also sent alarm bells ringing across several areas.
Video posted on social media late on Tuesday showed commuters chest-deep in murky floodwaters on a train in the dark, and an underground station turned into a large, churning pool. More 500 people were pulled to safety from the subway flood, Zhengshou city authorities said. Heavy rain pounded the central Chinese province of Henan on Tuesday, bursting the banks of major rivers, flooding the streets of a dozen cities and trapping subway passengers waist-high in floodwaters.
Henan, a populous province double the size of Austria, has been hit by storms since the weekend in an unusually active rainy season.
No deaths or casualties have been reported, but the daily lives of the province's 94 million people have been upended by transport closures.
In Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan on the banks of the Yellow River, more than 200 mm of rain fell in one hour on Tuesday, forcing the city to stop all subway train services.
Dramatic video shared on social media showed commuters waist-deep in murky floodwaters on a subway train and an underground station turned into a large, churning pool.
Henan is a major logistics hub but train services were suspended, while many highways were closed and flights delayed or cancelled.
In Ruzhou, a city southwest of Zhengzhou, streets have been turned into torrents, sweeping away cars and other vehicles, footage on social media showed.
A rising Yi River also threatened to hit the Longmen Grottoes, a UNESCO World Heritage site featuring millennium-old Buddhist statues etched into limestone cliffs near the city of Luoyang.
Like the Longmen Grottoes, the Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng city, famous in the West for its martial arts, has been temporarily shut.
Also in Dengfeng, an aluminium alloy plant exploded on Tuesday as water from a river surged into the factory.
At least 31 large and medium-sized reservoirs in the province have exceeded their warning levels.
From Saturday to Tuesday, 3,535 weather stations in Henan saw rainfall exceed 50 mm, of which 1,614 registered levels above 100 mm and 151 above 250 mm.
The highest was in Lushan city, which saw 498 mm of rain, according to the provincial weather bureau.
"This is the heaviest rain since I was born, with so many familiar places flooded," said an internet user in the inundated city of Gongyi on Chinese social media.
"The water reached my chest," one survivor wrote on social media. "I was really scared, but the most terrifying thing was not the water, but the diminishing air supply in the carriage."
Due to the rain, authorities in the city of 12 million people about 650 km (400 miles) southwest of Beijing, had halted bus services, said a Zhengzhou resident surnamed Guo, who spent the night at his office.
"That's why many people took the subway, and the tragedy happened," Guo told Reuters.
Amid torrential rains since last weekend, the death toll rose to at least 16 on Wednesday with four residents of Gongyi reported dead, according to local media. The city - located by the banks of the Yellow River, like Zhengzhou - has suffered widespread collapse of homes and structures due to the rains.
More rain is forecast across Henan for the next three days, and the People's Liberation Army has dispatched more than 3,000 soldiers and personnel to help with search and rescue.
From Saturday to Tuesday, 617.1 millimetres (mm) of rain fell in Zhengzhou. That's almost equal to Zhengzhou's annual average of 640.8 mm.
The rainfall in Zhengzhou over the three days was on a level seen only "once in a thousand years", local meteorologists said.
Like recent heatwaves in the United States and Canada and extreme flooding seen in western Europe, the rainfall in China was almost certainly linked to global warming, scientists told Reuters.
"The common thread here is clearly global warming," said Johnny Chan, a professor of atmospheric science at City University of Hong Kong.
"Such extreme weather events will likely become more frequent in the future. What is needed is for governments (city, provincial and national) to develop strategies to adapt to such changes."
