Photo: Sina Weibo

One person died and another suffered from minor injuries after the awning of a wet market in Qianjiang city, Central China's Hubei, collapsed on Sunday morning. Relevant departments have rushed to the scene to deal with the aftermath of the incident.  

According to information released by the authorities in Qianjiang city, the awning collapse happened at the Laoxinzhen wet market, at around 7 am on Sunday. About one-fourth of the canopy collapsed and caused minor injuries to one person. Another one who got injured in the accident died at hospital. 

According to video clips circulating on the internet, under the collapsed blue metal awning of the wet market resulted from the overnight snowstorms, there are parked minivans and some vendor booths. Large amounts of snow can still be seen on the ground. The wet market was cordoned off after the incident, according to ahwang.cn.  

A merchant from the Laoxinzhen wet market, also named as Qiannan farmer's trade market, told the media that the accident happened about 200 meters away from his booth. After the overnight snowfall, the snow on the ground was 10 centimeters thick on Sunday morning. Since there was snow on the ground, only a few people visited the market to buy food. Apart from the one person who died, there were several others who got fractured.  

According to the official WeChat account of the local weather forecast authority in Qianjiang, red alerts for snowstorms were issued around 11 pm on Saturday night and the snowstorm was expected to last for six hours.  

Extreme weather conditions including snowstorms and freezing rain sweeped across the country on Saturday, with the middle and eastern parts of Central China's Hubei, southern part of East China's Anhui, and middle and northern parts of East China's Jiangsu hit by snowstorms and blizzards. 

It is expected that the snowfall in the northern part of the country will stop on Monday while the rain and snow will continue in the southern part of the country until Chinese New Year's Eve, with some parts such as the northwestern part of Hunan, the eastern part of Hubei, and the middle part of Anhui severely affected by freezing rain and snowstorm.