Heat, floods, and a chemical scare force evacuations on three continents

Heavy weather in China stacked casualties through the middle of the week. On May 18 three people were killed and four were missing after flash floods overflowed a river in Xuan'en County, Hubei. The next day ten people were killed in torrential rain and flooding across Guizhou, Hubei, and Hunan, and the death toll from a pickup crash in Huanjiang, Guangxi, rose to ten after nine missing people were found.

By May 24 the rain had reached Chongqing. Three people were killed and 17 were reported missing after overnight torrents in Yongchuan. Five people were killed and another injured in a shop fire in Qidong County, Hunan. The scattered tolls showed how the same wet spell hit roads, homes, and small commercial buildings.

India faced a different hazard. At least 16 people died of heat stroke in Telangana as temperatures exceeded 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit. The state government announced public safety measures as the heat wave continued. The deaths were recorded while emergency crews in other countries were dealing with water rather than heat.

In California at least 10,000 homes were evacuated as wildfires spread on Santa Rosa Island and in Simi Valley. A separate industrial emergency then overtook Orange County. A tank holding 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate at the GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove overheated and was judged close to exploding, and more than 40,000 nearby residents were ordered to leave because crews lacked a ready way to stop the tank from cracking or entering thermal runaway.

Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Orange County on May 23 because of the possible release. The evacuation order covered the same figure of about 40,000 people as the leak continued. The order treated the chemical risk as a county-level emergency rather than a contained factory incident.

Other losses sat beside the weather. The 1,200-year-old Reikado Hall at Daisho-in on Itsukushima in Hiroshima burned down completely on May 20. In Vietnam five students drowned while swimming in the Lo River in Phu Tho. A separate road crash in Palghar district, Maharashtra, killed at least 13 wedding guests and seriously injured more than 20 when a tempo hit a container truck.