Chinese Floods Kill 250 During Past Week: Earth's 4th Deadliest Disaster of 2013

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Typhoon Trami hit Southeast China on Wednesday as a Category 1 storm with 85 mph winds, after dumping torrential rains in the Philippines that killed 17 people. Trami's rains are creating new flooding flooding problems for a Chinese nation already reeling from a week of deadly floods that have left over 250 people dead or missing. Twenty-one of the deaths came on Tuesday evening, due to a flash flood in northwest China's Qinghai Province. The deadliest incident came earlier this week, when torrential rains caused the Nei River in northeastern Liaoning province to overflow near the city of Fushuan, killing 54 people and leaving 97 missing. It's been a disastrous summer for flooding in China. According to the July 2013 Catastrophe Report from insurance broker Aon Benfield, the 250 people killed in the past week of flooding in China make this disaster Earth's fourth deadliest natural disaster of 2013. The deadliest was the monsoon flood in India and Nepal in June that killed 6,500; the second deadliest was the severe winter weather that hit India, Bangladesh, and Nepal in January, killing 329; the third deadliest was flooding in China in mid-July that left 305 people dead or missing. China had three billion-dollar flooding disasters in July:

June 29 - July 3, Southwestern, Central, Eastern, and Northern China: $1.4 billion in damage, 4 deaths
July 7 - 17, nearly every section of China,: $4.5 billion in damage, 305 dead or missing
July 21 - 25, Jilin, Gansu, Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, and Sichuan provinces: $1.4 billion in damage, 36 deaths

One positive note: Trami's rains are falling over portions of China that are in moderate to exceptional drought. The 2013 drought in China has been that nation's most expensive natural disaster of the year, costing over $10 billion.

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