Rescue crews in a mountainous county in southeastern China spent the past several days recovering bodies from mudslides that struck long after the typhoon that triggered them had already moved on, and the death toll now stands at 16. The delay between the storm’s landfall and the fatal ground failures underscores a pattern that shows up again and again after major tropical cyclones: the rain that lingers inland can end up doing more damage than the wind that made landfall.
The death toll climbs to 16 across three towns in Suichuan county
Searchers found another body in Jiangxi province’s Suichuan county, raising the confirmed death toll to 16, Chinese state media reported on September 10. The fatalities were spread across three separate towns: a mudslide in Gaoping killed 13 people, two more were found dead in Zuo’an, and one additional victim was recovered in Tanghu. More than 18,000 residents have been evacuated from Suichuan county as rescue teams continue combing the disaster area, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Two additional deaths were confirmed in neighboring Hunan province, where state media said rain from the same system triggered landslides and other hazards, though officials have not detailed the specific cause of those two fatalities.
Typhoon Saudel came ashore three times before the rain caught up
The landslides trace back to Typhoon Saudel, which Chinese state media reporting on the death toll said made landfall twice in Zhejiang province on August 28 before coming ashore a third time as a weakened tropical storm in Fujian province on September 3. Jiangxi and Hunan both sit well inland from those two coastal provinces, which is why the worst of the fatal ground failures did not occur until roughly a week after Saudel’s first landfall and days after the storm itself had dissipated as a distinct tropical system. Heavy rain associated with the storm’s remnants continued draining into the region’s hillsides for days, a lag that is common with typhoons that track over mountainous interior terrain after making landfall on China’s eastern coast.
A provincial response measured in hundreds of millions of yuan
Jiangxi’s emergency management authorities said Saudel’s rain had affected 250,300 people across 10 cities and 62 county-level areas of the province, causing direct economic losses of 452 million yuan, or roughly $67.3 million, according to a China Daily report carried by the Asia News Network. Of that provincewide toll, 8,350 people were evacuated as a precaution and another 14,600 were relocated and resettled after losing access to their homes. The National Commission for Disaster Reduction and the Ministry of Emergency Management kept a Level IV emergency response active for the province, while the Ministry of Natural Resources maintained a separate Level III response specifically for geological hazards such as landslides, a distinction that reflects how the danger shifted from wind and storm surge on the coast to slope failure well inland.
Rainfall records fell in two neighboring provinces
The same system set rainfall records outside Jiangxi as it moved through the region. In Hunan’s Guidong county, one monitoring station recorded cumulative rainfall of 925.3 millimeters, surpassing the province’s previous record for a single rainfall event, and the flooding there affected more than 10,700 people, leaving two dead and one injured. In Fujian, where Saudel made its final landfall, Donghai township in Putian recorded a maximum cumulative rainfall of 1,480.3 millimeters during the event, and the province’s meteorological administration assessed the storm’s overall rainfall intensity as the highest recorded since 1961. “The overall intensity was unprecedented,” the administration’s chief forecaster, Wu Qishu, said of the event, attributing the extreme totals to overlapping weather systems, sustained moisture transport, and repeated rain bands moving through the same areas in what forecasters described as a train-like pattern.
Why inland flooding often outlasts the storm that caused it
Landslide risk in the aftermath of a tropical cyclone typically peaks after the storm has already passed, not during it, because saturated soil takes time to fail. Days of sustained rainfall gradually reduce the friction holding a slope’s soil and rock in place, and a hillside can hold until it abruptly gives way once groundwater pressure reaches a critical point, sometimes well after the skies have cleared. That delayed-failure pattern is part of why inland provinces like Jiangxi, which never experience a typhoon’s wind field directly, can still register a storm’s deadliest consequences days after coastal provinces have moved into cleanup mode.
Search and recovery continue in Jiangxi
Photos distributed by Xinhua showed rescue teams working the site of the Gaoping mudslide as recently as September 5, days before the toll reached its current count, indicating that recovery operations spanned nearly a week after the initial failures. State broadcaster CCTV, which first reported the Gaoping and Zuo’an casualty figures, has not indicated when search efforts in the county are expected to conclude, and the evacuation total suggests authorities are still treating parts of Suichuan county as unsafe for return. The scale of the response, with evacuations running into the tens of thousands across a single county, reflects how widely the saturated terrain was assessed as unstable once the landslides began.
This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
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