China sees passenger flow surge on first day of Dragon Boat Festival holiday

China has seen a surge in passenger flow so far on Saturday -- the first day of this year's three-day Dragon Boat Festival holiday season, with railway transportation of outbound holidaymakers reaching a peak, according to estimations by transport administration authorities.

The railway passenger flow has shown a drastic increase, driven mainly by family visits and tourism. On Friday, China's railway system recorded 15.77 million railway passenger trips, with the number estimated to reach 17.8 million on Saturday, with 1,029 additional train trips scheduled.

Railway transport in the Yangtze River Delta in the affluent east China is expected to handle over 3.8 million passenger trips on Saturday, marking the highest daily passenger flow so far during the Dragon Boat Festival. New high-speed railway lines from Hangzhou to Wenzhou and from Shanghai to Suzhou and Huzhou, and the booming cross-boundary traffic on the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong high-speed rail have contributed to this surge. According to estimation, the number of cross-boundary railway passenger trips in the region would reach 520,000, marking a 19.7 percent year-on-year increase.

In terms of highway transportation, outbound traffic flow has surged so far on Saturday from large city clusters including the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in north China and the Yangtze River Delta. The total daily vehicle traffic on expressways during the holiday is expected to reach about 40.7 million cars. To deal with the increased traffic and potential weather changes, local transportation authorities are collaborating with meteorological departments to issue weather alerts to ensure the safety of travelers.

For air travel, airlines nationwide are expected to handle around 1.95 million passenger trips on Saturday, with multiple airline companies scrambling to add more passenger flights on popular routes.

The Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. For this year, the festival falls on Saturday, and the three-day holiday runs from Saturday to next Monday.

China sees passenger flow surge on first day of Dragon Boat Festival holiday

China sees passenger flow surge on first day of Dragon Boat Festival holiday

The death toll from a landfill collapse in the central Philippine city of Cebu has risen to eight by Monday morning as search and rescue operations continued for another 28 missing people.

The landfill collapse occurred on Thursday as dozens of sanitation workers were working at the site. The disaster has already caused injuries of 18 people.

Family members of the missing people said the rescue progress is slow, and the hope for the survival of their loved ones is fading.

"For me, maybe I’ve accepted the worst result already because the garbage is poisonous and yesterday, it was raining very hard the whole day. Maybe they’ve been poisoned. For us, alive or dead, I hope we can get their bodies out of the garbage rubble," said Maria Kareen Rubin, a family member of a victim.

Families have set up camps on high ground near the landfill, awaiting news of their relatives. Some people at the site said cries for help could still be heard hours after the landfill collapsed, but these voices gradually faded away.

Bienvenido Ranido, who lost his wife in the disaster, said he can't believe all that happened.

"After they gave my wife oxygen, my kids and I were expecting that she would be saved that night because she was still alive. But the night came and till the next morning, they didn't manage to save her," he said.

Death toll in central Philippine landfill collapse rises to eight