Human element to disaster

A firefighter carries a resident to safety in Tuhe village, Sandian township, Xinzhou district, Wuhan city, capital of Central China's Hubei province, Saturday, July 2, 2016. The flood breached an embankment of Jushui River in Xinzhou District Friday evening, leaving a 70-meter breach. Nearly 10,000 villagers were evacuated overnight. [Photo/Weibo]

Three days of heavy rain in southern and central China have caused floods that have left 50 people dead, with another 12 missing, and destroyed thousands of homes.

More than 7 million people have been affected in Central China's Hubei province, which has been the area hardest hit.

Such rains are undoubtedly a natural disaster. However, while all available resources have been mobilized for the disaster relief efforts, the lack of precautionary measures reveals the human element that has exacerbated the natural disaster. This also needs to be taken into consideration as part of disaster prevention work.

Some have compared this year's torrential rains to those in 1998. And given the disastrous floods that year, the country should have been more prepared for the floods this time.

Although many regions reinforced their anti-flood embankments along the tributaries of the Yangtze River and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam was meant to help prevent a "flood that comes only once in many years", the large-scale relocation of residents following the breach of some embankments has also raised questions about whether the local governments had sufficient precautions in place.

The disaster relief work has been well organized in the affected regions and the emergency response mechanisms have performed well, but why were cities flooded again although their authorities had vowed to prevent this?

As early as March, the meteorological authorities forecast that this year's rainy season would be similar to that of 1998 and the rainfall would be several times more than usual. With this knowledge, regions prone to floods should have been braced for severe rain and had in place measures to reduce the impact of floods.

Natural disasters are difficult to avoid, but we need every effort to prevent them from being compounded by human negligence.

--Beijing News