RTFri, 14 May 2021 06:41 UTC
© China Daily via ReutersAn ambulance in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on February 14, 2020
Two tornadoes have ripped through central and eastern China, killing one person, injuring more than 60 people and causing significant damage in each locality, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
One person died and 21 were injured, two seriously, after a storm system struck the Shengze area of Suzhou city in eastern China's Jiangsu province.
Electricity infrastructure was damaged and several factory buildings collapsed, city fire officers told Xinhua.
Dramatic footage purportedly captured by stunned eyewitnesses in Shengze and shared online appeared to show a huge tornado carrying miscellaneous debris through the air, and lightning cracking across the sky.
The other tornado was reported to have hit the city of Wuhan in China's central Hubei province, where six people were reported missing and 41 were treated in hospital.
The storm hit the Caidian District at 8:39pm local time (8:39am ET), according to Chinese media. Construction site sheds were also destroyed and a large number of trees snapped, local officials told Xinhua.
Comment: Update: AP reports (via
ABC News) on May 15:
Back-to-back tornadoes kill 12 in China; over 300 injured
Back-to-back tornadoes killed 12 people in central and eastern China and left more than 300 others injured, authorities said Saturday.
Eight people died in the inland city of Wuhan on Friday night and four others in the town of Shengze, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) east in Jiangsu province, local governments said.
The first tornado struck Shengze about 7 p.m., damaging homes and factories and knocking out power, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The Suzhou city government, which oversees the town, said in a social media post that four people had died and 149 others had minor injuries. Shengze is near Shanghai on China's east coast.
Another tornado hit Wuhan at about 8:40 p.m. with winds of 86 kilometers (53 miles) per hour, destroying more than two dozen homes and triggering a power outage affecting 26,600 households, Xinhua said. Officials in Wuhan said at a news conference Saturday that eight had died and 230 were injured.
They said that 28 homes collapsed in Wuhan, another 130 were damaged and put economic losses at 37 million yuan ($5.7 million), the Hubei Daily newspaper said. Construction site sheds and two cranes were also damaged, while downed power lines knocked out electricity, Xinhua said.
Photos showed a swarm of rescuers searching through building debris in Wuhan after midnight Friday and workers clearing metallic debris at a factory in Shengze in the morning.
Wuhan is the city where COVID-19 was first detected in late 2019.
Tornados are rare in China. In July 2019, a tornado killed six people in the northeastern Liaoning province, and another tornado the following month killed eight on the southern resort island of Hainan.
In 2016, a tornado and accompanying hailstorm killed 98 people in the eastern Jiangsu province.
See also:
Comment: Update: AP reports (via ABC News) on May 15: See also: