Ten Remain Missing After a Mudslide Buries a Village in Jiangxi

A mudslide set off by days of rain from Typhoon Saudel buried houses in a village in Jiangxi province early on Friday morning, killing at least two people and leaving ten missing. As rescuers combed the wreckage, a government explainer on how to read the warning signs of a landslide was trending nationwide alongside the disaster.

The slide hit Mingkeng village in Gaoping town, Suichuan county, at around 4 a.m. on Friday, while most households were asleep. Twelve houses were damaged, eight of them flattened, according to Xinhua. Three people were pulled from the debris in the first hours, one of them dead, and eleven were listed as missing. On Saturday morning rescuers found another of the missing in the collapsed houses, with no life signs, bringing the toll to two dead and ten unaccounted for.

Typhoon Saudel, the same storm that left Putian, in neighbouring Fujian, under water earlier in the week, kept rain falling on Jiangxi's mountains for days before the slope failed. The rescue itself is running against the mountain: on Saturday the site collapsed a second time — one of three Suichuan items on Baidu's trending board, a measure of how closely the country is following a search involving firefighters from Nanchang, Ji'an and Ganzhou.

As the search went on, a second hashtag climbed the Weibo board: "what are the warning signs of a geological disaster". People's Daily relayed graphics from the Ministry of Emergency Management showing what a slope does before it fails — new cracks that widen, soil trickling from the slope face, a spring that suddenly runs cloudy or cuts off, a stream that surges or vanishes, a rumble like thunder or rolling boulders.

A widely shared post put the lesson bluntly: "Geological disasters give no advance notice. Learning to read these small signs can save your life at the critical moment."

Hazard literacy is a seasonal ritual in China. The flood season runs through the summer, and the emergency ministry's graphics are reposted by state media every time a hillside makes the news. This summer has given the lesson unusual force. From the ice-avalanche mudslide that wrecked Tibet's Gyirong valley on the Nepal border to Saudel's flooding, Chinese rescuers have been fighting water on two fronts all month, and readers have been absorbing the vocabulary of slope failure along the way — which may be why an explainer of warning signs sat at number four on Weibo's trending list while the disaster itself sat at seventeen.

In Suichuan, the identities of the missing have been confirmed and the search around the buried houses continues. Officials have given no timeline for ending it.