Watch How Bitcoin Miners in Sichuan Are Being Flooded

A life-threatening disaster hit Aba prefecture in Sichuan, China, causing enormous damages. The four-days-long heavy rainfall produced raging floods and massive mudslides which directly impacted miners in the “Bitcoin mining capital”, as Sichuan is called.

Two videos came out today, posted by Poolin, the fourth-largest mining pool, the first of which is showing the moment the mudslide hit a local mining farm yesterday, completely destroying all in its path.

The second video shows the aftermath and the people digging their equipment from the mud.

That’s not all, as numerous miners and other equipment have been found submerged in water or have been carried away by the rivers next to which many farms have been situated, with no way of knowing as of yet precisely has anyone been hurt or how much of the equipment has been lost, what is the cost of the damages, or how much will it cost to repair it and re-establish the farms once it’s possible to do so again. Either way, the flooding of this size is likely to cause power shortage and halt mining operations for some time.

Nonetheless, 8BTC writes that the situation was even worse last year. They have quoted a miner saying how the water has risen to the second floor and that all their clients’ mining machines have been submerged. An unnamed source said that, to their knowledge, three mining farms have been damaged, including their own. “The flood knocked down two three-story shelves with more than 100 mining machines washed away in my mine, causing more than 1 million yuan losses”, the source is quoted as saying, adding that the roads have been blocked by floods and landslides, making it “difficult to check the scale of damage.”
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Hash rate, or the computing power of the Bitcoin network, somewhat dropped yesterday, but it has been fluctuating for the past month also.