The tornado struck homes, farms and factories near the city of Yancheng, with winds of up to 78mph.
The city has a population of more than eight million people and is situated about 500 miles south of Beijing.
Dozens of people were injured and large numbers of buildings destroyed, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.
Recent extreme weather conditions including torrential downpours added to the chaos and carnage in Jiangsu province, located north of Shanghai.
"Downpours, hail storms and a tornado battered parts of Yancheng city... causing many houses to topple," said the agency.
Jiangsu's fire and rescue service crews were dispatched to secure chemicals and other potentially dangerous items at a sprawling solar panel factory in the Yancheng suburb of Funing.
Images posted by media online showed mass devastation - people wandering around their flattened homes, overturned cars, split tree trunks, broken power lines and motorists attempting to drive down severely flooded streets in their vehicles.
One photograph showed a wrecked three-storey schoolhouse with fallen trees strewn across its playing field.
State broadcaster CCTV News showed footage of people carrying the injured to hospitals.
Southern and eastern parts of the country have experienced weeks of heavy rainfall and storms that have caused widespread severe flooding, resulting in a number of fatalities and leaving 20 people missing.
The south is hit every year during the monsoon months of May, June and July.
However this year, water levels in some major rivers have exceeded those of 1998, when vast flooding affected 180 million people.
No comments:
Post a Comment