Zhouqu: The death toll from mudslides in northwest China surged to 337 on Monday, as rescuers used diggers and their bare hands in a desperate search for more than 1,000 others still missing.
Mudslides engulfed a town in northwest China on Sunday, killing at least 127 people and leaving nearly 2,000 residents missing as rescue teams dug out crushed homes and sought to blast away debris clogging a river.
BEIJING, 27 JULY: Over 630 people have been feared killed or missing during the last two weeks in floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains in China, taking the death toll since early this year to over 1,000.
Meanwhile Chinese rescuers continued to search for 13 people who went missing after a bridge collapsed in flash floods in central Henan Province last weekend.
Two labourers lost their lives and three people were injured at Kanlog in Shimla due to heavy rains on Sunday morning. A temporary hutment made of tin sheets collapsed in an under-construction building resulting in the death of two people.
JAIPUR: Initiatives for stepping up preparedness for natural disasters, establishment of safety nets such as grain bank and fodder bank and exercises for hazard vulnerability analysis at the village level in Rajasthan were highlighted at an international workshop on disaster prevention organised in Japan earlier this month.
Scars still remain on the hills of Nilgiris, or the Blue Mountains. The brown patches are not only testimony to the hundreds of landslides that killed around 50 people last November, but also of what over-exploitation and the real estate boom has done to the fragile ecosystem of the verdant Queen of the Hills.
Shimla: Environmentalists fear that cutting of slopes for four-laning of the Shimla-Parwanoo section of the National Highway-22 will destabilise the fragile mountain ranges, making the stretch prone to landslides.
