72 Hours of Torrential Rain: Washed-Out Paddies, Interrupted Lives

From Foodthink

First came a once-in-sixty-years drought. From November last year to April this year, Guangxi’s average rainfall was nearly 70 per cent below the norm for the same period — the lowest since complete meteorological records began in 1961. Severe drought struck some areas, affecting 2.38 million people.

When the flood season arrived, drought gave way to flooding. Since 18 June, the Liujiang River Basin in Guangxi has experienced a sustained, widespread period of heavy rainfall, with torrential to extreme rainstorms hitting Liuzhou, Hechi, Baise and other areas, and exceptional rainstorms in some localities. Among Foodthink’s own farming contacts in Hechi and Liuzhou alone, several have been hit by floods, enduring water and power cuts, submerged paddy fields, and poor fruit-tree pollination — disruptions that trouble daily life and severely threaten this year’s livelihoods.

As climate change drives up temperatures and increases atmospheric moisture, the likelihood of sudden swings between drought and flooding will only grow. Soil compacted by drought absorbs far less water, making flooding, landslides and other disasters all the more likely when heavy rain follows — and making such events even harder to forecast.

Foodthink has compiled the firsthand accounts of four people who were there. Let us hear what they went through, and what they make of the floods.

 Guangxi, Liuzhou, Sanjiang County, Heli Village

It started raining here on 20 June — torrential rain for two days and two nights straight. The water and power went out, we lost all signal, and we huddled inside our darkened homes too afraid to step outside, our nerves fraying. Some people, too worried to stay put, put on straw hats or grabbed umbrellas to check on their paddy fields and fish ponds.

In all my life, I remember only one great flood, back in 1996 — but this one was worse. Our hills are fairly tall, reaching up to 800 metres above sea level. Trees and boulders were swept down the slopes, entire sections of tea gardens slid away in landslides, and further down the force wiped out roads and farmland alike — a sight too terrible to look at.

Every household has a small fish pond. We raise our own common carp and grass carp to eat on holidays or when guests visit. Now every fish in the village has been swept away. Thankfully, the government has taken out agricultural insurance on the paddy fields for the whole village. They’ve asked us to photograph our own fields and submit them to the village for tallying, and an insurance company may come to process claims.

Once the rain eased, the first priority was to restore the water source. The village’s source sits on a hill at 500 metres, and it had been destroyed too. It was placed up on the hill because there’s no farming there, so the water is cleaner. The village built a small reservoir to collect the spring water, and two or three pipes carry it downhill, through two settling pools, before being distributed to each household. The whole gravity-fed water system had been built inside a mountain gully, but the entire gully had been scoured clean to the bedrock. The reservoir was washed away, and as for the pipes — not a trace of them remained.

Fortunately, last year the villagers pooled money and labour on their own initiative to restore two water sources at the foot of the hill. These two backup sources have now become vitally important. As droughts have been so severe in recent years, we dug out some old mountain spring wells and repaired them for use, even building wooden pavilions on top so that villagers can rest and drink while heading up and down the hill for work, and the wells can also serve for emergency irrigation.

When we proposed restoring the backup sources last year, the villagers all said: with the drought this bad, it would at least give us some security; even in a flood like this, they’d come in handy. Over these past two years, we’ve all come to realise that the climate is growing erratic — getting both drier and wetter.

This downpour wrecked the pavilions, twisting them askew. Villagers went out immediately to clear the wells; fortunately, the water wasn’t too turbid. For now, we’ve cobbled together some discarded pipes to divert the floodwater from the gully for household use. The day before yesterday we spent the whole day up on the hill, surveying and compiling records, then went to the county government’s water-resources bureau for help. The bureau said it wasn’t just our village — many townships are in the same situation, and quite a few are applying for aid. They will collect and tally the reports, but there’s no quick fix.

In truth, we’ve grown used to drought over the years. The first half of this year was particularly dry. When it came time to transplant rice, there wasn’t enough water to puddle the paddies. Those remaining water sources barely covered drinking needs. Even drinking water sometimes ran short, let alone irrigation. Each family had no choice but to take turns waiting for water to harrow their paddies — it would trickle from your field, then flow into mine.

We never expected that just after we’d finally finished transplanting, most of it would be submerged by floods again — all that work for nothing. Here, no family has a large plot; we grow mainly for our own use. I’m the exception, with a somewhat larger area. A few villagers and I grow over ten mu of ecological paddy rice and sell it in town. Now four or five mu have either been washed out or submerged, and on others, sediment and rubble have buried the seedlings. Fortunately, the remaining five mu sit on higher ground, just outside the flood’s path.

There’s simply nothing you can do about a disaster like this. The washed-out and mud-covered fields cannot be saved. I plan to go once the waters recede, check the submerged paddies, and see if the seedlings can be stood back up. Every little bit helps.

Actually, it’s not entirely without recourse. Twenty or thirty years ago, our hillsides were all natural forest. Then, because poverty drove us to develop an industry, everyone cleared land to plant Chinese fir. Now the hills are thick with Chinese fir and thin on other species, and villagers have begun to see that the extreme droughts and floods are linked to this monoculture. The elders say that in a mixed forest, with all its diversity — narrow-leaved trees, broad-leaved trees, and so on — each species absorbs and releases water at a different rhythm. Now it’s all Chinese fir: they all absorb water at once and release it at once. In a drought, every tree draws in moisture; when heavy rain follows and the trees are saturated, they all give up their water simultaneously. That’s why flash floods on these hills build so suddenly and violently.

In recent years, we’ve started planting native, diverse tree species on our own initiative — in public spaces, along roadsides and around water sources. We hope it will make some difference.

 Guangxi, Nandan, Lihu Township

All day last Thursday the rain came down hard. We’d always had flooding after torrential storms before — we were used to it and didn’t think much of it. But we never expected the floodwater to rise so fast this time. In my memory, it has never come up so fiercely.

I’ve heard the reservoirs upstream discharged their floodwater. Our land sits low, and it is Karst topography, with an abundance of underground solution caves. During this downpour, everyone said they finally understood why our place is called “Lihu” — “inside the lake.” The underground rivers are all interconnected; here in Lihu there are many outlets and inlets. Once an underground river swells violently, water surges up from below the surface.

What flooded this time were mainly Lihu Community and Badi New Village. I live in Lihu Community, where a single long, steep slope runs the entire length of the street. My house sits midway along the street, at a relatively high point, so we escaped the flood. Everything below the middle was basically submerged. An auntie lives at the far end of the street — the river outside her door is usually dry, but this time a great flood poured through.

The auntie’s husband and her two eldest daughters work away from home; only she and her youngest daughter were left. The government ordered an evacuation and arranged temporary shelter in the school dormitory, but the mother and daughter couldn’t bear to leave their belongings and kept hauling things up to higher ground.

This is a White-trousered Yao area. The women all make their traditional costumes entirely by hand. The auntie had made several sets of ceremonial dress for her three daughters — worn for the annual market fair, a relative’s funeral, and weddings. A single set costs a great deal in accessories and takes years of hand-sewing. During those two days of extreme rainstorm, the two of them carried the garments from the ground floor all the way up to the third floor, and when exhaustion overtook them at night, they slept guarding the costumes.

By one o’clock on Saturday morning, seeing that the water was still rising, the two of them finally decided they had to go. But the neighbours around them had long since been evacuated. They threw an oilskin over their shoulders and slipped out through the back door on the first floor, braved the downpour, climbed up the hill, found a footpath through the undergrowth and made their way to a relative’s house three kilometres away — about forty minutes’ walk. I said, going out so late, that must have been terrifying — weren’t you scared? They said, with the two of us together, we weren’t scared.

The day before, during the day, they came to stay at my place, still fretting about those costumes, regretting they’d only carried them to the fourth floor — if only they’d managed to get them to the fifth. They were so upset they couldn’t sleep a wink all night. The auntie phoned her husband, who works in Hunan. But both roads leading out of town — one towards Libo in Guizhou, the other towards Nandan county seat — were cut off. Her husband came back from the Nandan direction; apparently he climbed up the mountain and went right around it to get home.

On Sunday, the moment the rain stopped, they went back and found that the water had only reached the second floor and the costumes were perfectly safe — and they were overjoyed. If another day of extreme rainstorm had fallen on Sunday, my house would certainly have been flooded too.

The government sent in relief supplies on an inflatable rescue boat: vegetables, water, and a generator, because the power had already been out for two days. Yesterday at midday the street got its electricity back, but there was still no water. I took a five-kilogram bucket to a neighbour’s place at the end of the street and brought back a few buckets to cook and drink with. But later even the street end ran dry, so I had to go to my mum’s house up on the hill to fetch water. The hill still had water because the supply feeds a high reservoir first, then distributes to each household. The reservoir had plenty.

A friend of ours runs a restaurant on the main street. Last Friday evening we had an event and ordered dinner from him. When I went to return his pots and basins, there was nobody at the restaurant, so I peeked into the kitchen. They were all downstairs shifting things; the water was already knee-high. The basement housed chickens and pigs, and every one of them had been submerged. The chickens were easy enough to move, but they’d fattened the pigs so well — each one weighing four or five hundred jin — and getting them up the steep stairs to higher ground, I honestly don’t know how they managed. We were still joking: tomorrow morning we’ll come to your place for breakfast. The next day my husband said, forget it, everything’s underwater, the roads are gone, the flood will certainly have reached above the shop level by now.

Badi New Village was flooded too. Being on low ground, the new village floods every year. People used to live on the hilltops. Around 2008, it is said, ice storms and rockfalls prompted the government to organise resettlement in batches. But once everyone moved to Badi New Village at the foot of the hill, they didn’t last long before heading back. The houses are tiny, and far from their own plots of land. Wanting to grow some vegetables, keep a few chickens or a pig — none of that is easy down here. In the countryside you still need to gather firewood, and we have our weddings and funerals to attend. If you need to call your relatives over, the new village houses at the bottom of the hill are simply too small. We sing at the wedding banquet, and there isn’t even room to set up a single long table. So everyone went back to build their houses beside their plots on the hillside.

 Guangxi, Nandan, Lihu Township, Huaili Village

I arrived in Huaili Village on 11 June, staying at the village’s White-trousered Yao Ecological Culture Museum. This was my second visit to research the mulberry silkworm culture of the White-trousered Yao. During the first week I was there, I helped the villagers tend their mulberry silkworms, which were just reaching the spinning stage — thankfully, it did not rain those few days. The villagers told me that if a thunderstorm strikes while the silkworms are spinning, the quality of the silk suffers, and the mulberry leaves fed to them must always be dry.

Barely two days after the silkworm-raising season ended, the rain began. On the evening of 20 June it came down in sheets, and half of the village’s ethnic plaza was submerged. In the small hours, the museum’s circuit breaker kept tripping, and then the power cut out altogether. At first I assumed the water had reached the museum’s electricity meter, but when I chatted with the villagers, they all said it was the substation that had been flooded — and that none of them had ever seen the water level so high before.

On the afternoon of the 21st, Sister He, a museum staff member, turned up with her entire family. The He family runs a hardware shop on the main street, which sits on low ground and had suffered the worst of the flooding. As the water began to rise on the 20th, they had been shifting stock from the shelves on the ground and first floors up to the second and third, working until four in the morning the next day — only to realise it was futile: sooner or later the water would reach the ceiling, so there was no choice but to come and stay at the museum.

The whole township had lost power. If you wanted to charge a device, you had to go to the canteen at Lihu Primary School or the health clinic. On the evening of the 21st, with nothing to do, I walked with Sister He and the others to a friend’s place in Huaili Dazhai, a hamlet a kilometre away, to find that the solar-powered streetlamps along the way were actually still lit.

A power cut we could cope with; what we could not do without was water. Behind the museum there is a reservoir, and villagers from several neighbouring communities come here to draw water, so we had no trouble on that front. Sister Lüfen even came to the museum to do her washing.

By half past eight on the morning of the 22nd, the water had reached the front gate of the township government. When I passed by past three in the afternoon, it had receded at least thirty or forty metres. Township government volunteers were helping to clean the streets, some in protective suits disinfecting the roads. Sister He and her family were back on the street, endlessly bailing standing water out of the shop. After the water receded, it left a thin layer of silt on the ground.

Hechi, Du’an County, Laren Town, Yaru’o Hamlet

My farm is in Yaru’o Hamlet, Laren Town, 122 km from Du’an county seat and over 160 km from Lihu Township in Nandan. We have no large rivers or gullies here, so flooding is rare — unlike Sanjiang County, where Afu lives, which sits downstream of the Rongjiang (Editor’s note: around the same time, Rongjiang in Guizhou was hit by a once-in-thirty-years flood). All my pomelo trees are planted on slopes with good drainage, and Laren Town has never experienced the kind of torrential rain that triggers a landslide — perhaps it’s a spot blessed with good feng shui.

Although we escaped the floods this time, rain came down for over a straight week, washing all the pollen off the passion fruit blossoms — without pollination, no fruit sets. I only started growing passion fruit last year, and the weather then was the exact opposite of this year’s: too much rain in the first half, so the seedlings only went in around Labour Day. Planting late naturally means a smaller harvest — just over 1,000 jin from slightly more than a mu.

The first half of this year saw drought. We put the new passion fruit seedlings in the ground and waited until May for rain. The forecast said more was on the way, so we had no choice but to wait for a dry spell, prune back the branches whose pollen had been knocked off, and let the vines flower again. Passion fruit keeps growing, and we should have a batch ready for market next month.

Having lived through all the rain last year’s first half, I was somewhat prepared for downpours — but I certainly wasn’t ready for drought. The dry spell started in the second half of last year, just as my fruit harvests were winding down, so I didn’t think much of it. Who would have guessed it would drag on from last year all the way into this one? The yield from my just over two mu of corn will surely be halved.

I started farming in 2013, and this is the first time I’ve faced a drought this severe. The rain only came in mid-May this year; had it arrived just two weeks later, the corn would have been a lost cause. In weather this dry, you can’t do liquid manuring — I dilute biogas-fermented pig and cow manure with water to feed the crops, but without water there’s no feed, and without feed nothing grows. I also have a few mu of small yellow ginger, which is actually fairly drought-tolerant. I planted them in mid-March, but sprouting has been slow; if they’d had another month’s growth, the rhizomes would have been noticeably bigger.