Rural infrastructure inadequate

In the latest floods across a large swathe of China, rural areas have been hit harder than urban areas in terms of their casualties, although the waterlogging of big cities has dominated the headlines.

Different from many cities whose infrastructure is rarely damaged by flooding and where there are few casualties, in rural areas the heavy rains and floods often cause severe damage and many casualties.

The collapse of a 70-meter-long section of a riverbank in a district of Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, in early July, which caused six nearby villages to be submerged, was reportedly related to the lack of necessary measures to reinforce the river's banks.