Continuous rainfall brought by Typhoon Bavi has pushed the Shuiyang River above its warning level in Xuancheng City, east China's Anhui Province, triggering flood alerts, resident evacuations and enhanced emergency response.
At 01:20 on Monday, the Xinhezhuang hydrological station on the Shuiyang River recorded a water level reaching the warning mark, prompting the provincial hydrological authorities to issue a yellow flood alert for the Anhui section of the river, the third-highest level in the country's four-tier color-coded weather warning system.
Although rainfall eased during the day, heavy upstream precipitation over the past two days continued to drive the river level higher.
At Jinbaowei, a low-lying polder in Xuancheng, the river level reached 11.13 meters, about 0.5 meters above the warning level.
Local authorities have evacuated 26 residents from 17 households living along the river as a precaution against possible flooding.
More than 800 personnel have been deployed to patrol the embankment around the clock. Patrol teams are rotating every two hours, with each team responsible for inspecting about two kilometers of dike for seepage, erosion and other potential hazards.
Jinbaowei, home to about 8,600 hectares of farmland and some 3,300 hectares of water surface, is one of Xuancheng's major grain-producing areas.
With persistent rainfall coinciding with elevated river levels, the risk of waterlogging has increased significantly. To reduce that risk, local authorities have activated five pumping stations to conduct preemptive releases to increase storage capacity for possible further rainfall.
Typhoon Bavi, the ninth typhoon of the year, landed on the coast of east China's Zhejiang Province at around 23:20 Saturday, according to the Zhejiang provincial meteorological observatory.
The typhoon, with the maximum wind force at its center reaching 40 meters per second when landing, first churned ashore at Yuhuan City, a county-level city administered by the city of Taizhou, before making a second landfall in Yueqing City under the city of Wenzhou at around midnight.
After landfall, the typhoon is expected to continue moving northwestward while weakening.
Typhoon Bavi pushes river above warning level in east China
