When I first arrived in Beijing in the summer of 2012, I was greeted with what local authorities called “a historically rare storm”. Trains were late, traffic was congested, basements were flooded and a man driving an SUV drowned in logged water under the Guangqumen Bridge.
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A total of 79 people died and the government vowed to make changes. Then Beijing mayor Guo Jinlong said the disaster had exposed many issues in Beijing’s urban planning, infrastructure and emergency management, stressing the need to ensure such a disaster would never occur again.
The city’s residents were caught off guard. People’s homes in the basements of blocks of flats were flooded, and victims had to camp out on the pavement for days. My colleagues and I waded through ankle-deep mud to interview villagers who had not seen this coming.
Beijing is traditionally dry in the summer, they told us. Shortly after the driver drowned at Guangqumen, I noticed online shops selling safety hammers for cars – previously, people didn’t realise you couldn’t open car doors when you drove into deep water. Beijing’s sewage system wasn’t designed to take on heavy rain, either. During my years there, whenever it rained, water quickly accumulated on the streets, sometimes ankle-deep.
Fast forward to last month when Beijing was once again hit with an extreme storm, leading to 44 deaths and nine people missing, 31 of whom were at an elderly care home in the suburbs. This round of storms touched other northern provinces as well – 10 campers in Inner Mongolia were killed in sudden flooding, while in Shanxi province a bus carrying 14 pepper pickers went missing.
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Reading the news immediately transported me back to my early days in Beijing, talking to villagers who expressed disbelief at how much damage mere rain could do. In the past decade, China’s rain belt has been expanding northward.