A landslide in China’s Southwestern Yunnan Province on Jan. 22 has left dozens of people missing, while hundreds more have been forced to evacuate. The disaster struck in the village of Liangshui near the town of Tangfang in Zhenxiong County.
China’s CCTV state television quoted a local official as saying that the death toll had risen to 11 as of Monday evening.
At least 50 people buried in some 18 separate houses remain unaccounted for. The bodies of nine victims have already been recovered, though the freezing temperatures in the region are likely to hamper efforts to find survivors.
The landslide occurred just before 6 a.m. on Monday, and more than 500 people have been evacuated, according to CNN.
Drone footage released by local state media shows buildings buried in dark mud amid the surrounding snow. The cause of the disaster wasn’t immediately known.
Information relating to disasters in China is often suppressed or altered to suit the Chinese communist regime’s narratives, such that none of the above could be independently verified, while the number of casualties could be much higher.
The landslide follows a powerful earthquake that struck China’s Northwest in a remote region between Gansu and Qinghai Province last month, killing nearly 150 people.
The 6.2-magnitude quake struck on Dec. 18, and was the most powerful earthquake to hit China in almost a decade. The quake triggered several heavy mudslides that buried two villages in Qinghai province. The earthquake injured around 1,000 people and destroyed over 14,000 homes.
Yunnan province is currently experiencing extreme weather conditions, with temperatures at or below freezing, China’s National Meteorological Center reported.
Landslides are common in China’s Southwestern region due to the area’s humid and rainy climate. Areas where masses of land were shifted as a result of agriculture or mining are particularly affected. Other susceptible areas include deforested regions and slopes around engineering projects, which in China are often carried out without adequate safety measures in place.
In September last year, at least seven people were killed when a landslide hit China’s Southern region of Guangxi, the Guardian reported.
Last June, nearly two dozen people died when a landslide tore through a mining company’s worker dormitory in a mountainous rural district of Leshan county in China’s Sichuan Province.
In 2022, a landslide at a construction site in Southwestern China killed 14 people, injuring multiple others.
And in 2015, a landslide buried and toppled buildings at an industrial park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.