Death toll rises as Beijing counts cost of freak storm

The death toll from a freak storm in Beijing that caused pounds 1 billion damage is expected to rise, with long sections of one of the city's major motorways still under several feet of water.

Two days after parts of Beijing were flooded with as much as 18 inches of rain, sections of the six-lane G4 Jingshi Expressway, China's oldest motorway, resembled a lake.

Rescue teams used cranes yesterday (Monday) to begin fishing out dozens of vehicles which were submerged along the road.

At one point, where the road runs close to a river, 18 vehicles, including three buses, sat in five feet of water.

"I heard a hundred people could have died here," said one bystander who climbed up an embankment to look down on the scene, before the police moved away the crowd.

So far, Beijing police has confirmed 37 deaths, while 57,000 people were forced to leave their homes.

The failure of this motorway, as well many others, to cope with the rainfall has provoked anger in the Chinese capital, which has spent billions of pounds on its infrastructure in recent years.

"Chinese cities are apparently unpractised in facing disasters such as Saturday's torrential downpour," said the Global Times, a government-run newspaper, in an editorial.

"If so much chaos can be triggered in Beijing, the capital of the nation, problems in urban infrastructure of many other places can only be worse."

Zhang Junfeng, a senior engineer at the transport ministry, pointed out that six months of water had fallen in a single day in Beijing. "No drainage system could withstand such rain," he said.

The deluge caused more than 31 roads to cave in and caused damage estimated at more than 10 billion yuan (pounds 1 billion), Pan Anjun, the deputy chief of the Beijing flood control headquarters, told Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

Elsewhere in Fangshan, an outlying region of Beijing which seems worst hit by the storm, the damage was immense. At the Shidu scenic area, a broken road meant has stranded up to 10,000 tourists.

In Hebeizhen, a village in the mountains, an entire street was swept away, after a torrent of water hit a factory and four houses.

"The water was coming up to our necks at one point," said Hao Sufeng, whose sister owned the factory. "When the water came, it just burst through the buildings."

More than nine million people have so far expressed their views on the Chinese internet over the handling of the storm, with many choosing to vent their anger.

"Beijing has been defeated by a huge rainstorm, the city's infrastructure has failed, there is nothing here to be proud of," posted one person on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, under the name Zhulidemixu.