洪水 Flood

Yesterday as we piled into the school's white 面包车 to head to play some basketball, 杨效长 excitedly asked me if I was bringing my camera since we were going to see 黄河. The river is more than ten kilometers away from our village so I wondered why we would have to make such a long detour when me and some other coworkers wanted to shoot some hoops in the first place. Turns out we wouldn't have to go as far as we thought, the river had come to us.

As we looked off to the side of the road we saw a sea of brownish water where acres of farmland had stood the day before. Swollen from rapidly melting snow in the mountains, the river had flooded it's banks and was engulfing factories and villages kilometers away from it's shores. Talking to the locals who were milling at the edge of the waters with their cellphone cameras out, we learned that this is an event that happens once every thirty to forty years. I could now understand the excitement that 杨校长had. As a lifelong resident in the area, the last time he had seen this was as a child.

The next day I went back to the site we first visited and saw that the water had gone more than 50 meters past yesterday's boundary. The steady rain that lasted through the night had certainly not helped things. Guarding several properties against the approaching tide was a hastily made eight foot wall of earth that stretched for a half kilometer in the direction of the water before making a right angle, creating a large square that was still safe for growing the 小麦and油菜 that was currently in season. Large tracks from the backhoe that the government services had used to build it the previous night could be seen all along the muddy soil.

Looking at a map of the area, I would estimate that dozens of square kilometers have been covered by this flood and I don't know if the water has reached its peak yet. The loss of crops must be tremendous, as the majority of what is underwater now was farmland.