Record rainfall floods China’s “Hawaii” island

Extreme rainfall pounded the southern Chinese province of Hainan, known as China’s “Hawaii,” amid the transit of yet another tropical cyclone, leaving the island half-submerged in a year of record-breaking wet weather.

Cities in Hainan including Sanya, famed for its palm trees, seafront hotels and sandy beaches, remained waterlogged due to Tropical Storm Trami to the south. Sanya logged 294.9mm of rainfall over a 24-hour window, the most for any day in October since 2000.

Trami made landfall in central Vietnam after a slow trek across the South China Sea from the Philippines, where it left at least 125 people dead and 28 missing. While Hainan did not take a direct hit from Trami, Chinese authorities took no chances, recalling all fishing vessels and evacuating over 50,000 people.

China’s entire eastern coastline has been tested by extreme weather events this year — from the violent passage of Super Typhoon Yagi across Hainan in September to the strongest tropical cyclone to strike Shanghai since 1949. Scientists warn more intense weather is in the offing, spurred by climate change.

“In October, the national average precipitation was 6.3 percent higher than the same period in previous years,” Jia Xiaolong, a senior official at the National Climate Center, said at a news conference.

Last week, the water along China’s Bohai Sea inexplicably rose up to 160 cm in a matter of hours despite the absence of any wind, leading to a tidal surge that flooded the streets of Tianjin and many cities in the northern provinces of Hebei and Liaoning.

“It’s hard to imagine how much power was needed to push such a large area of sea water to one place,” Fu Cifu, an official at the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center, said.

Amid disaster recovery efforts this summer, authorities had to provide billions of dollars in additional funding to support reconstruction in multiple regions from the south to the northeast of China.