China flood survivors tell of rising water and last goodbyes as disaster claims at least 25 lives and displaces thousands

Passengers were trapped in subway trains in Zhengzhou, some struggling to reach rescuers and others sending what they feared were final words to loved ones

Survivors sharing their stories on Weibo are told to remove them to avoid being ‘manipulated by hostile foreign forces’, while photos and videos are deleted

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Passengers were trapped in Zhengzhou’s subway system as tunnels and trains were submerged by the floods. Photo: Weibo

Published: 3:28pm, 21 Jul 2021Updated: 1:45pm, 22 Jul 2021

For those trapped in submerged underground trains as Tuesday’s horror unfolded in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, it was a life-and-death matter of keeping their heads above water in the hope that help would arrive.

The rare torrential rain that began on Saturday has claimed at least 25 lives – 12 of them in flooded subway stations – left seven other people reported missing and displaced 200,000 people in Henan’s provincial capital. The cumulative rainfall in three days was close to a normal year’s worth for the city and paralysed its public transport system, while cars were flipped on flooded roads and ground-floor shops and flats were swamped.

“We are used to ankle-level downpours in the summers,” one survivor, who was trapped on his way home on Tuesday evening, told Chinese media. “A recent flood in Zhengzhou [washed away] many cars, but it was nothing like this time, which completely annihilated everything.”

According to the Zhengzhou government, more than 500 passengers were rescued after all of the city’s rail services were suspended at 6pm on Tuesday, but chaos continued as water poured into subway stations.

A photo posted on Weibo by user merakiZz- shows the inside of a submerged subway car during the flooding on Tuesday evening. Photo: AFP

Details of the horror were censored in mainland media coverage and on social media. Photographs and videos posted on Weibo, featuring unconscious bodies pulled from the water, were deleted, while survivors sharing first-hand accounts were told in their comment sections to remove them, to avoid being “manipulated by hostile foreign forces”.