BEIJING – Forklifts cleaned up mud and silt as rescuers searched through ruins yesterday for 17 students missing after a flash flood swamped a school in northeast China and swept 92 people to their deaths. The flood hit the same day a fire raced through the top floors of a southern hotel and killed 31.

Authorities in Beijing were struggling to handle the twin tragedies thousands of miles apart, trying to overcome faulty communications in the flood zone and vowing to dispatch an emergency team of investigators to the hotel fire.

Friday’s flash flood slammed a school in Shalan, a remote town in China’s far northeastern province of Heilongjiang, claiming the lives of 88 students and four villagers, the official Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday.

Another 25 people were hospitalized, it said.

About 352 students – all between 6 and 14 years old – and 31 teachers were in the school when it was slammed by a torrent of water gushing down a mountain after heavy rains, the agency said.

Telephone calls were not answered yesterday at the school or city government offices in Shalan.

The death toll is likely to rise as authorities searched for 17 more missing students, Xinhua said. It said forklifts were cleaning out mud and silt while dozens of policemen checked the ruins for bodies.

State television showed vehicles slowly driving through flooded streets and rescue workers in orange jumpsuits shoveling out debris. Footage also showed medics carrying bodies out of the rubble, while children breathed through respirators in a hospital.

Meanwhile, in China’s far south, a fire engulfed the top three floors of a hotel, killing 31 people, state press said.

The fire broke out at noon Friday at the Huanan Hotel in Shantou, a city in Guangdong province, and swept through the top stories of the four-story building, the reports said.

Early dispatches said five people had died, but rescuers found more bodies when they entered the hotel after putting out the fire, Xinhua said.

Another 15 people were injured, four of them seriously, it said.

It was unclear how many people were in the hotel at the time of the blaze, which took three hours to extinguish.

Images on state television showed the neighborhood shrouded in heavy gray smoke, and still photographs showed firefighters removing tanks of cooking gas from the hotel.