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The lives of millions of people in Henan have been upended since the weekend in an unusually active rainy season that has led to the rapid rise of a number of rivers in the vast Yellow River basin.

Many train services across Henan, a major logistics hub in central China, have been suspended. Many highways have also been closed and flights delayed or cancelled.

Roads in a dozen populous cities have been flooded. Videos on social media showed residents, their arms interlocked, wading across streets in fast-moving water. One video showed an adult and a child being swept away on a major artery choked with half-submerged vehicles.

From the evening of Saturday until late Tuesday, 617.1 millimetres (mm) of rain had drenched Zhengzhou - almost on par with the city's annual average of 640.8 mm.

FamousDrScanlon wrote:Central Chinese province swamped after heaviest rain in 1,000 years

Rescuers pulled inflatable boats in flood waters gushing through streets of Turkey's Black Sea district of Arhavi on Thursday to bring those stranded to safety.

Footage released by the country's interior ministry showed distressed residents being evacuated from flooded homes. Access to dozens of villages in Arhavi were blocked and rescue efforts were under way - with officials saying 200 people had been evacuated.

Floods are common along Turkey's Black Sea coastal region at this time of year. Last week, at least six people were killed and two others went missing in flood waters in Black Sea province of Rize

The storms are not seasonal for the south and the east of Yemen, which is usually dry this time of year.
The country’s northwestern highlands experience seasonal rain from late spring through early fall.
The storms also damaged crops, roads, and telecommunications infrastructure.

Seven people were killed by floods and another one was killed by lightning in 16 provinces, Mahdi Valipour, an official with the Iranian Red Crescent Society, said on Friday.

More than 200 rescue and relief groups are working in 61 counties affected by natural disasters, he noted.

The IRCS forces have provided relief for some 5,000 people, accommodating 835 ones in shelters and relocating 58 others to safe regions.

Terrified passengers trapped in flooded subway cars in Zhengzhou, China. Water cascading down stairways into the London Underground. A woman wading through murky, waist-deep water to reach a New York City subway platform.
Subway systems around the world are struggling to adapt to an era of extreme weather brought on by climate change. Their designs, many based on the expectations of another era, are being overwhelmed, and investment in upgrades could be squeezed by a drop in ridership brought on by the pandemic.

The recent flooding is yet another example of the kind of extreme weather that is consistent with changing climate around the world.
Just days before the China subway nightmare, floods in Germany killed some 160 people. Major heat waves have brought misery to Scandinavia, Siberia and Pacific Northwest in the United States. Wildfires in the American West and Canada sent smoke across the continent this past week and triggered health alerts in cities like Toronto, Philadelphia and New York City, giving the sun an eerie reddish tinge.
Flash floods have inundated roads and highways in recent weeks, as well. The collapse of a portion of California’s Highway 1 into the Pacific Ocean after heavy rains this year was a reminder of the fragility of the nation’s roads.
But more intense flooding poses a particular challenge to aging subway systems in some of the world’s largest cities.
In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has invested $2.6 billion in resiliency projects since Hurricane Sandy swamped the city’s subway system in 2012, including fortifying 3,500 subway vents, staircases and elevator shafts against flooding. Even on a dry day, a network of pumps pours out about 14 million gallons, mainly groundwater, from the system. Still, flash flooding this month showed that the system remains vulnerable.

“It’s not supposed to be a pond,” said Joe Bouchard, a retired captain and former base commander. “It is now.”

In the past 10 years, Norfolk Naval Shipyard has suffered nine major floods that have damaged equipment used to repair ships, and the flooding is worsening, according to the Navy. In 2016, rain from Hurricane Matthew left 2 feet of water in one building, requiring nearly $1.2 million in repairs.

This month has seen widespread flooding on almost every continent, from the U.S. to China, from India to Italy, in extraordinary events that climate scientists say have been made more extreme by human-induced climate change. The World Meteorological Association says global mean surface temperatures are already 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average.

But research by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the UK Meteorological (Met) Office, published today in the journal Science Advances, indicates that most communities will experience even more extreme wet conditions with each degree of temperature rise.

So it’s not that countries will necessarily have much more rain on average; it’s that we’ll see rain events becoming heavier and less predictable.

The research also implies that rather than floods necessarily becoming more frequent, heavier rainfall could make them more destructive.

JuanP wrote:It looks like it's the USA's turn to get swamped. I rest easy knowing that President Biden is taking care of things.