At least 78 people died Thursday after a powerful tornado, hailstorms and heavy rain slammed into eastern China, turning buildings into rubble, crushing trees and leaving many homeless, according to various reports.
In addition to the dead, at least 500 people suffered injuries -- 200 of them critical -- the Xinhua news agency reported after the weather barreled through Yancheng City in China's Jiangsu province on Thursday afternoon. Hundreds of villagers were trapped in rubble, according to Xinhua.
"I heard the gales and ran upstairs to shut the windows," area resident Xie Litian, 62, told Xinhua. "I had hardly reached the top of the stairs when I heard a boom and saw the entire wall with the windows on it torn away."
The roof then collapsed as he raced downstairs, Xie said. After sheltering in a corner for 20 minutes, he emerged to find the neighborhood transformed into a wasteland. "It was like the end of the world," he said.
The affected area is about 500 miles south of Beijing.
Video from the disaster showed scenes of children being carried on the back of mopeds, broken trees and overturned cars, the BBC reported.
Other photos showed a wrecked three-story school with large trees strewn on its playing field. Its windows had been blown out and its roof and upper floor torn off, along with those of numerous other buildings.
Bodies were shown lying in the open or buried in rubble. At least one hog farm was hit, its livestock covered in bricks and roofing material.
Although President Xi Jinping called for "all-out rescue efforts," rain and the potential of further hailstorms and more tornadoes complicated rescue efforts, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
The disaster has been declared a national-level emergency. Tents and other emergency supplies were already being sent from Beijing, CCTV said.
Jiangsu is a coastal province north of Shanghai. Yancheng is an ancient city with more than 8 million people.
Tornados occasionally strike southern China during the summer, but rarely with the scale of death and damage caused by the one on Thursday.
This year, southern and eastern China have experienced weeks of torrential rain and storms that have caused widespread flooding and dozens of casualties. Floods in southern China earlier in the week left 22 people dead.
The southern part of the country is hit every year during the May-July monsoon season, but this rainy season has been particularly wet. Water levels in some major rivers have exceeded those of 1998, when China was hit by disastrous floods that affected 180 million people, according to state media reports.
Contributing: The Associated Press
