Authorities in southern China said Thursday that flooding from Tropical Storm Maysak has killed 39 people, and most of the deaths came after a dam broke in an area east of Nanning. Ding Wei, the city’s vice mayor, said at a news briefing that the breach killed 26 people. Nine people remained missing in the broader Guangxi region. The numbers are brutal. So is the machinery behind them.
Who Pays When the Water Breaks Through
Maysak brought record rainfall to Guangxi starting Saturday, breaching reservoirs and stranding people for days in homes and other buildings. The previously announced death toll was six people. That gap tells its own story: the first count was small, the damage was already large, and the full scale only surfaced after the waters had done their work. Taiwan and China’s east coast were bracing for another major storm expected to make landfall in the coming days, while people in Guangxi were still dealing with the wreckage of the last one.
Typhoon Bavi was forecast to pass just north of Taiwan, bringing heavy rain to the island of 23 million people, and make landfall in Zhejiang or Fujian province on Saturday. Heavy rain battered southern Guangxi for days, with cumulative rainfall of 10 to 40 centimeters, or 4 to 16 inches, in some areas and more than 90 centimeters, or 35 inches, in hard-hit areas, the national meteorological center said. The weather kept coming. The damage kept stacking up.
The Rescue Machine
The reservoir breaches sent torrents of water into towns and cities. Drones and some 5,700 boats were used in a massive relief and rescue operation to reach people trapped by the waters, with rescuers battling stiff currents and debris. About 130,000 people have been evacuated. That’s the scale of the response: a huge mobilization after the fact, aimed at pulling people out of danger that had already been unleashed.
Ding said the floodwaters were receding, but more rain was expected in some areas in the next two days. Crews were deployed to clear mud and debris and disinfect several towns in hard-hit Hengzhou city, which is east of Nanning and under its jurisdiction. Road repairs were ongoing and electricity had been restored to more than 60,000 homes, Ding said. The apparatus moves in stages: first the breach, then the rescue, then the cleanup, then the disinfecting, then the repairs. Ordinary people absorb the shock at every step.
What the Officials Said Last
Ding Wei’s briefing put the official version on the record: 39 dead, 26 of them tied to the dam breach, nine missing in Guangxi, floodwaters receding, more rain still coming. The city’s vice mayor spoke for the system after the system had already failed to keep the water where it belonged. The national meteorological center supplied the rainfall totals. Crews, boats, drones, road repairs, restored electricity. All of it points to a familiar arrangement, where public life depends on institutions scrambling to manage disaster after the damage has already been done.
The people trapped in homes and other buildings didn’t get a briefing. They got the flood.