China's Rescuers Fight Water on Two Fronts: Tibet's Four-Metre Mudslide, Fujian's Record Flood
As 195 firefighters rotate through the buried Gyirong border crossing in Tibet, Typhoon Saudel made a record third landfall and drowned Fujian's coast under rain totalling 821 millimetres in three days.
China's rescue services are fighting water on two fronts this week. In a Himalayan valley in Tibet, 195 firefighters are rotating through four metres of mudslide debris in search of the missing. On the southeast coast, they are pumping out towns drowned by a typhoon that will not stop coming back.
At Gyirong, the border crossing with Nepal buried by last week's mudslide, the search has entered its deepest phase. With the damaged stretch of the G216 highway finally reopened after seven days of work — at the worst point, water flowing at six to seven metres a second washed out whatever crews filled in, and two hours of effort advanced the road less than five metres — heavy equipment has reached the core zone. Firefighters have formed 195-person assault teams going in three shifts at a time, working "flip a layer, search a layer, clear a layer", as the official account of China's fire services described the method. Debris across the crossing averages four metres thick.
The work is slow and its findings are grim. On Thursday evening, Beijing Daily showed rescuers sifting items pulled from the silt to police waiting at the cordon — among them a uniform. "This is definitely ours," an officer says in the video. CCTV reports that laser-monitoring instruments now watch the surrounding slopes around the clock for secondary flows, while medical teams disinfect the zone. The disaster's cause — a glacier collapse on the Nepal side — was set out by officials over the weekend.
The coast, meanwhile, was dealing with Typhoon Saudel. It came ashore a third time at 6:30 on Thursday morning near Zhangpu county, on Fujian's southern shore — after two earlier strikes on the same Zhejiang town of Yuhuan, itself a rarity in the record books. Zhangpu, Zhao'an and Dongshan ordered the "three stops and one rest" — no work, production, classes or markets.
The worst water fell north of the landfall. Putian has taken two extreme rainstorms in three days, up to 821 millimetres in all, by the tally of China Weather Lovers, an amateur forecasting community whose river readings are widely cited. The Mulan River broke its record twice; at the ancient Mulan Weir, the high-water gauge stone vanished a metre beneath the surface, the river 2.2 metres above the mark set in 2023. In Putian a man swept from his car hugged his schoolbag as a float until firefighters reached him; in Xianyou county a flash flood knocked down a three-storey house, with no casualties reported. In Fuding, "China's No. 1 white tea town", floodwater tore through warehouses days before harvest stock was to move — one dealer put losses near 2 million yuan. A 600-year-old banyan at the Yunshuiyao tulou scenic area was uprooted.
There is no clean edge to the season. As Saudel's rain moved inland on Thursday evening, Typhoon Krovanh entered the 48-hour warning line east of Okinawa, and eleven ferry routes to the Dachen Islands were suspended in response — the third named storm now being tracked in Chinese waters at once.