Gansu, an arid province in China’s northwest, published an investigation in April finding that getting warnings to people on the ground was its main weakness encountering disasters. The report was three months old when the water came down the Shuangshimen gorge.
Ma knew how quickly rain could turn dangerous at Shuangshimen. He sells barbecue from a truck near mountain attractions across Gansu and was familiar with the gorge. When hail began falling on the road Sunday morning, he called his cousin, who had driven ahead with three other families in three cars. His cousin said they were packing up to leave, but they never made it out. The first two vehicles cleared the gorge’s narrow entrance, while his cousin’s car became trapped. Debris smashed through the rear window and threw his cousin’s son from the vehicle. The boy climbed to higher ground and watched as the car, with his father inside, was swept downstream.
The July 26 flash flood tore through Shuangshimen, a ticketed scenic area in Gansu’s Weiyuan County, killing 10 people and injuring 23. Rescuers brought 174 people to safety. As of the morning of July 28, Ma’s 48-year-old cousin, an employee at a township government office, remained missing. With families barred from entering a 500-metre stretch covered by mud and debris, Ma asked villagers downstream to watch the water for any sign of him.
The committee overseeing the gorge passed a flash-flood warning to the scenic area at about 9 a.m., nearly four hours before the water surged through.
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The warning reached the scenic area at 9 am and stopped there
Shuangshimen draws campers from June to September, when the gorge is green and the stream is cold. Entry costs 8 yuan, a little over one US dollar. Bringing a car in costs another 10 yuan.
Before Sunday, three city-level agencies responsible for meteorology, water management and emergency response had issued flash-flood warnings. A separate rainstorm alert issued at 10:30 a.m. did not include the campsite area. Asked whether the site operator had warned visitors as they bought tickets, a committee staff member told Red Star News that he did not know what measures had been taken on the ground. The company has not publicly said what, if anything, visitors were told that morning.
Visitors said no one at the entrance warned them of the danger. Several people interviewed by Jiemian News described little more than a ticket booth at the gate, with no patrols inside the gorge, no public announcements and no visible safety signs. With no designated parking area, drivers left their vehicles on the gravel bar beside the stream.
That broke the operator’s own rules. Reporters photographed two notices beside the ticket booth. One, dated August 2025, barred private vehicles beyond the first stone gate. The other said the site would close in rainstorms, lightning, or high winds. Neither was in force on Sunday. Staff did turn away one group of eight that morning, telling them the road inside was too dangerous in the rain.
Wang Chen, another visitor, walked out with water already at thigh height while most people were still sheltering under canopies. “It was cold and everyone was in shorts and T-shirts, so hypothermia comes easily,” he told Jiemian News. “The three of us who left together tried to persuade other visitors, but they did not realize anything dangerous was about to happen.”
A death toll that has not moved since Sunday evening
Officials have not listed anyone as missing, and the reported toll of 10 dead and 23 injured has remained unchanged since 5:40 p.m. on July 26. Independent verification inside China is not possible. State media have also given conflicting accounts of when the flood struck, placing it at either 12:50 p.m. or around 2 p.m.
Survivors questioned the official toll almost immediately. One tourist told an overseas Chinese-language outlet that more than 200 people had been inside the gorge, that the operator issued no warning and focused instead on collecting entrance fees, and that only about 10 of the roughly 60 vehicles that entered made it out. Vision Times could not independently verify the account. A 16-year-old survivor who was swept off his feet and spent about an hour clinging to a tree said he had counted 40 to 50 vehicles on the meadow. Unsourced claims of a higher death toll also circulated among overseas Chinese users on X on July 27.
Gansu published a report in April on this exact failure
Eleven months earlier, flash floods, landslides and mudslides destroyed several villages in Yuzhong County, north of Weiyuan, killing 32 people and leaving 19 missing. A provincial investigation released on April 28 found that difficulties producing accurate and effective forecasts and warnings were common across Gansu and had become a major obstacle to improving the province’s disaster-prevention capabilities.
Beijing News, a Chinese commercial daily, argued that the Shuangshimen disaster exposed how poorly prepared northern China remains for a rain belt shifting into regions long considered too dry to face serious flooding. At Shuangshimen, the forecasts were issued and a warning reached the scenic area nearly four hours before the flood. The breakdown came in the final step: turning that warning into an evacuation alert for the visitors standing in the streambed.
Shuangshimen was a ticketed scenic area overseen by an administrative committee and run by an operating company, with formal closure rules and a ban on private vehicles. Caixin reported that a member of the county’s political advisory body had identified the same weakness in a 2024 proposal, describing the site as profitable but crudely managed. Two days after the flood, no government official or company executive had been publicly identified as being under investigation.
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