BEIJING, July 20 (Reuters) – Rescue teams in southwestern China used explosives on Monday to blast through heavy boulders hampering efforts to reach 34 people reported missing for three days after a landslide during torrential rain in an area famed for natural beauty.
China is one of the most landslide-prone countries in the world, and eight died in Friday’s disaster in the county of Penghui some 270 km (168 miles) from the high-rise urban centre of the sprawling municipality of Chongqing.
Monday’s blasting operation shattered a massive boulder in television images shown by state broadcaster CCTV, which added that the mission had entered a “deep rescue phase”, although it gave no immediate details.
The effort followed President Xi Jinping’s call for scientific search and rescue operations for the missing as well as a swift investigation into the cause of the landslide.
Authorities evacuated more than 1,100 people after the landslide in the county home to about 500,000 people, where many communities cling to steep hillsides that hug the Wujian river.
In the aftermath, video clips and photographs showed a portion of the collapsed mountainside cascading into the river, cutting off the main street of the narrow, hillside township.
Authorities have sent teams to investigate hidden geological dangers and monitor the risk of secondary disasters, the official news agency Xinhua said on Saturday.
With heavy to torrential rain forecast through Monday across multiple provinces, authorities have called for stronger safeguards in high-risk areas made vulnerable by abundant groundwater, and intensive construction.
Eight small and medium-sized rivers in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guangdong, Anhui, and Shanghai are currently above flood warning levels, CCTV said on Monday.
Intense summer rainfall, coupled with rapid urbanisation and construction, as well as frequent tectonic activity, are key contributing factors to disasters in China, where mountains, hills and plateaus make up two-thirds of the landmass.
Over the past decade, a total of about 294 people have been killed nationwide in at least five major, deadly landslides.
The worst such incident killed more than 70 after the December 2015 collapse of a massive pile of construction debris at an industrial park in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen.
(Reporting by Farah Master in Hong Kong, Liz Lee in Beijing and the Beijing newsroom; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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