When the recent floods hit China, they brought back painful memories for Huang Yuping, who in 1998 spent three months trapped with her husband in a shed on the roof of their home when a similar disaster struck, killing more than 4,000 people.
“It was miserable,” she said. “We had little food and no clean water, and nobody to help us.”
The couple survived on the meagre rations they had stored up and drank tap water. They did not have a bathroom and their only toilet was a board with a hole in it that led to the waters below.
Huang said she did not sleep well and feared for her safety. She heard that her neighbour fell into the water and drowned while trying to save her son.
Every day, she looked at the water level and hoped it would recede.
The couple’s home is in the village of Dixi, in the city of Shangrao, east China’s Jiangxi province. The village stands beside a river linked to Poyang Lake – China’s largest freshwater lake – and the mighty Yangtze River, which regularly floods in the rainy season.
Dixi became submerged again in early July, as China faced its worst floods for decades, with torrents raging across 27 provinces. The water level in the Yangtze has risen to record highs, and many people have likened the situation to 1998.
Millions of Chinese live close to lakes and rivers, like the Yangtze, which runs 6,300km (3,900 miles) west to east through 11 provinces. The land beside the waterways is fertile and good for farming, but residents pay a price when the rains come.
Huang and her husband were better prepared for the torrents this year than they were in 1998. When they saw the waters heading their way, they ran out of their house, got on their bikes and crossed a bridge to the neighbouring village. Later, they were given refuge at a camp set up by the local government at a school.
Other villagers were not so lucky. Li Dongping said she thought this year’s floods were worse than in 1998, sweeping through the village within hours. Her mother was trapped in the family home and had to be rescued.
In 1998, Li was a young and fearless 21-year-old. When the waters came, rather than being scared, she said she was a little excited. But she still grabbed her niece and ran to the hills.
By the time everyone had reached higher ground, all of their homes were under water, their pigs had drowned and their crops were spoiled.
Wild animals also sought refuge on the higher ground. Rats followed the villagers, then snakes.
“They twisted on the ground, stretched out like pig intestines,” Li said.
But things were even worse this time around.
“We’d just built a two-storey house, but now it’s gone,” she said.
Some of her neighbours captured the devastation on their phones. One piece of footage showed people watching as a three-storey house slid under the water, Titanic-style. Within seconds, it had gone.
According to figures from China’s Ministry of Water Resources, between 1950 and 2018, floods killed more than 280,000 people, destroyed over 120 million homes and damaged more than 9.6 million hectares of crops.
Between 1990 and 2018, the direct economic cost of the floods was more than 4.37 trillion yuan (US$623.6 billion).
While the seasonal torrential rains are often blamed for the floods, human activity has also played its part, according to Fan Xiao, geologist and chief engineer at the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau.
“As the population increased they took over areas that used to be lakeland, so when the really heavy rains come – maybe not every year, but perhaps once a decade – the villages and farms flood really quickly,” he said.
People who live in low-lying areas are used to having to respond quickly when the rains come.
Wu Xiezhi and her husband Huang Dongmin said that when the floods arrived this year, they quickly packed up all the screws and nails from their hardware store and moved them to the third floor so they would not get washed away.
They said they did not bother saving things like clothes and blankets.
“We wanted to save the valuables,” Wu said.
When the house became submerged, they were trapped on the third floor. With the rescue teams too busy to help, Huang decided to save himself – by making a raft out of four wooden boards that he nailed together.
He and his son paddled the raft through the village, which was completely flooded and dotted with floating debris. They wanted to check on Huang’s mother, but their progress was blocked by a mass of floating grass. Huang tried to move it with his paddles but was unable to get through, so the pair returned home.
The family had only instant noodles to eat, but no water, so they ate the lumps like biscuits. The next day, Wu's cousin rowed to their house and rescued them.
Across the village, people helped rescue their friends, family and neighbours in whatever boats they could find or manufacture. Once rescued most people sought refuge with relatives, while those who had no one to care for them were accommodated in the local school.
Now, all they can do is wait for the waters to recede.
“It will take at least two months,” Huang Dongmin said. “In 1998, it was about 80 to 100 days.”
Although China deploys huge numbers of people in the flood season to monitor rivers and lakes and check dams, riverbanks and dykes for breaches, the heavy rains always find a way through and residents have to deal with the consequences.
Liu Junyan, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace East Asia, said many Chinese cities were built along rivers and people had always migrated towards them, so it would be unrealistic to abandon them.
“The only way is to modify urban planning to better estimate climate risks in the long term,” he said.
All the villagers can do is deal with the situation the best they can. Then rebuild. Then wait for the next time.
“The floods will definitely come again,” Huang Yuping said. “I’m in my 50s and I’ve already experienced them twice. I will experience it once more for sure.”
