China flooding brought fear, then washed away livelihoods

The night the rains came, all Yu Ruiping could do was huddle at her market stall

XINXIANG, China -- The night the rains came, all Yu Ruiping could do was huddle in her market stall. The electricity went out. Her phone went dead. And the water just kept rising. When the skies cleared, the market was surrounded by chest-high water — trapping Yu and her husband for two days with nothing to eat but a few packages of instant noodles. “It was the most water I’d ever seen,” Yu said, standing in her family warehouse in a neighborhood of Xinxiang, a city of six million people in the heart of central China's Henan province. The torrent of rain last week burst dams and collapsed bridges, immersing large swaths of Henan in water. In the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, a year’s worth of rain fell in just three days. Authorities announced a sharp rise in the death toll Thursday to 99 people.