A China Subway Flood Survivor’s Harrowing Experience: ‘I May Not Be Able to Get Out’
HONG KONG—As floodwaters surged into a stalled subway train beneath the Chinese town of Zhengzhou, Pure Li hurriedly tapped out farewell messages to a near mate on her smartphone. “I could not be in a position to get out,” she wrote.
The 26-yr-previous engineer was 1 of far more than five hundred travellers trapped during the night rush hour Tuesday, as torrential rains pummeled the central province of Henan. A dozen people wouldn’t make it out alive, authorities say, and at the very least two ended up continue to missing as of Saturday morning.
Desperate illustrations or photos from commuters surrounded by roiling water went viral on Chinese social media this week, hanging a nerve in a country that has vastly expanded its subway units, and suffered a series of critical underground flooding incidents that have raised protection alarms.
On Thursday, China’s Ministry of Transportation requested subway units nationwide to re-take a look at and boost contingency strategies for excessive temperature. Authorities in Zhengzhou, Henan’s capital town, and Zhengzhou Metro Group, the state-owned subway corporation, didn’t reply to requests for comment.
As rain fell in Zhengzhou on Tuesday, turning streets into swiftly flowing rivers and wreaking hundreds of thousands and thousands of bucks of destruction, according to state media, water began to pool in a train lawn, the metro corporation reported in a assertion. It then broke by a wall and flowed into a tunnel.
