China: Massive Floods Shatter Mining Facility in Sichuan Province

According to videos published on Twitter on the morning of August 21 by Poolin, a cryptocurrency mining facility has been severely damaged due to a massive flood that hit China’s Sichuan province in the last weeks.

Natural Disasters

It has been two weeks since China’s national weather observatory issued a yellow alert for rainstorms, as heavy rain will sweep most parts of the country.

One of the most affected counties has been Wenchuan in Sichuan. The continuous rainfall increased the saturation of the soil creating a situation prone to geological disasters like landslides and mudslides according to Weather China, the weather forecast website of the China Meteorological Administration. In addition, the mudslides cut off power and communications while also blocking roads that connect the main cities.

Local authorities and companies are trying their best to evacuate locals and tourists but according to news published by XinhuaNet, eight people have died and 26 remained missing after heavy downpours on Tuesday.

The flood also clearly damaged various companies in the region, including some Bitcoin mining farms. In fact, some twitter videos have emerged that show how workers were trying to recover the now completely mud-covered hardware. Videos have been posted by Poolin, the third-largest mining pool by hash rate.

2/2 clip of personnel digging out miners from the mud: pic.twitter.com/QebXEqBjrN — Poolin (@officialpoolin) August 21, 2019

The mining farm shown in the video was not part of the infrastructures used by Poolin and, given the size of the flood, it will not even be the only one to have been damaged.

In fact, Red Li, co-founder of Chinese crypto media outlet 8btc, also tweeted that “some mining facilities were wiped out by flood in Sichuan yesterday.”

Looking at the data from Blockchain.com, Bitcoin’s hash rate per second dropped from the all-time high of 82,5 EH/s on August 19 to 77,4 EH/s as per the time of writing. We cannot confirm that this decrease is due exclusively to the damage caused by the flooding in China, but the disaster has certainly made a contribution.

[Image Source: Blockchain.com]

History Repeats

It is already the second year in a row that the Sichuan region suffers from this type of cataclysm.

In the same way, last year the flooding resulted in the collapse of a few mountain formations and raised river water levels, causing damage to local hydropower and telecommunication infrastructure.

But last year the overall damage to the Bitcoin industry was fa larger than this one as tens of thousands of Chinese mining rigs went offline causing a sharp drop (from 43 EH/s to 30 EH/s) in Bitcoin network hash rate.

The Sichuan province is very well known for its cheap electricity supply and is effectively the world’s crypto mining headquarters, hosting several mining setups built using basic construction setups in remote mountain villages.