China Flood Hits School at Least 97 Dead Mostly Children - Scores Missing (from ATSNN)

Chinese school flood kills scores
Source

The death toll from a flash flood which hit a Chinese primary school on Friday has risen to 92, with more than a dozen people still missing.

Eighty-eight of the dead were young children trapped in their classrooms when the waters surged.

Bodies floating

China's media has been reporting the first eye-witness accounts of the disaster and its aftermath.

Jia Yibo, father of one of the dead children, told China Daily that he arrived at the school to find 40 small bodies floating in waist-deep water.

Three children and a teacher were stranded on a window sill.

"My son was placed on a desk and the desk's surface was only a little higher than the water level," Jia said.

"His nose, ears and mouth were filled with mud and garbage, and when I touched him, I found he was dead," the paper quoted him as saying.

“I heard there were already 199 bodies at the local crematorium by this morning,” the woman, an employee at a post office next to the devastated school, told Reuters.

Most of the more than 90 refrigerators at the local funeral home each contained the bodies of two children, villager Liu Zixia, whose daughter drowned, was quoted as saying by the Shanghai Morning Post on Monday.