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28 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
At least 16 people have died and dozens more have been buried after a landslide swept through a village in the mountains of southern China, local government and state media have said.
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The landslide smothered 16 homes on Friday morning in Zhaojiagou village, and hours later more than 40 people were missing, said a notice posted on the website of Zhenxiong county in Yunnan province, where the village is located.
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Rescuers recovered 16 bodies, among them a family of seven, said a report on the website of the Yunnan Daily, the official newspaper of the provincial government.
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Photographs posted on the news site showed rescue crews in orange jumpsuits using construction machinery to sift through massive piles of mud and earth.
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Behind them stood hillsides and pine trees covered in snow, signs of the unusually cold winter that has hit all of China.
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Reports did not say what triggered the landslide, but such events do occur periodically in the region, which is prone to earthquakes and heavy rains.
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In a nearby county, 81 people died after an earthquake in September.
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A month later, a landslide buried a primary school, leaving 18 students and one other person dead.
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Cold spell
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Elsewhere in the southwest Guizhou province, an estimated 420,000 people are in a "state of disaster" due to the freezing weather, state-owned People's Daily said.
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Over the past few days, temperatures in China have plunged to their lowest in 28 years, with frozen coastal waters, cancelled flights and closed highways.
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In the city of Genhe in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the temperature reached a low of minus 44.8C, marking the fourth big temperature drop the region has experienced thus far this winter.
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The cold front has also contributed to heavy fog, which has reduced visibility in some areas to less than 70 metres and is affecting traffic and travel throughout the region.
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The extreme weather is forecast to continue for the next three to five days according to the local meteorological department.
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