A bus fell into a river in northern China on Monday, leaving at least two people dead and 12 others missing after flooding from heavy rains destroyed homes and covered farmland.
Video posted online showed people on top of an almost submerged bus in a rushing river flowing over a nearby bridge outside the city of Shijiazhuang, about 265km southwest of Beijing.
Authorities in Hebei province said in a social media post that 37 of the 51 people on the bus had been rescued.
In neighbouring Shanxi province to the west, more than 1,20,000 people had been evacuated as thousands of houses collapsed and 1,90,000 hectares of crops were damaged, the official Xinhua News Agency said on Sunday.
The heavy rains in Shanxi, normally a dry region, damaged a 25-metre section of a wall in the historic town of Pingyao, a UNESCO world heritage site, Xinhua said.
Continuous rain is the biggest threat to the city’s ancient clay structures, the state news agency said.
