Archives

CHANGSHA, China, Friday (Reuters) Chinese authorities have evacuated 600,000 people from around the dangerously swollen Dongting Lake as it threatens to engulf millions more, a local official said on Friday.

Floods in the southern province of Hunan, where hundreds of thousands of people are trying to prevent Dongting spilling over, had already killed at least 16 people, he told Reuters.

"So far we have evacuated 600,000 people who live close to the Dongting Lake so that we can release floodwater," said the official from the Hunan office of the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

"Everybody wanted to leave the area because they were afraid of flooding," he said. "We delivered some 2,000 tents to evacuees and gave them food for free."

He gave no details of where or how the people died, but said 8.4 million had been affected by floods.

The official Xinhua news agency said more than a million people were piling sandbags and checking for breaches in hundreds of miles of embankments around Dongting that protect 10 million people living in a region of flat, fertile farmland.

The China Daily quoted the Ministry of Civil Affairs as saying 27,000 houses had collapsed and 415,000 hectares (one million acres) of crops were damaged in Hunan, but it did not specify where.

The crisis point is expected on Sunday, when a flood crest surging down the Yangtze River sweeps into Dongting, a body of water covering about 1,000 square miles (2,700 square km) or roughly the size of Luxembourg.

The lake has been rising an average half a metre (1.6 ft) a day this week and was 2.72 metres (nine ft) above its flood warning level on Friday morning, a local flood control official said.

"The waters on Dongting have reached 34.72 metres," or 114 ft, he told Reuters.

That is its highest level in nearly three years but still more than a metre (three ft) short of the lake's historical high of 35.9 metres (118 ft) in 1998, when China's worst flooding in decades killed more than 4,000 people.

The official gave no further details, saying he had been ordered not to speak to reporters. Foreign reporters have been allowed to go to Hunan's capital, Changsha, but have not yet been given permission to visit Dongting.

The provincial government was preparing for the worst, clearing roads so that relief goods, such as tents for those driven from their homes, could get through, state media said.

Two cities, Changsha and Wuhan, with a combined population of 13 million, are also at risk.

Already, some 3,000 people in Changsha, which stands on the banks of one of four swollen rivers feeding into Dongting, have been forced from their homes on an island as it virtually disappeared under water.

"Some people have been clearing out, others are going back to collect their stuff," said fisherman Duan Xuicheng. "I've been taking them back and forth from morning until night."

Those still there were either up to their waists in water or taking refuge on the second floor of their homes.

China's summer floods have already killed more than 900 people despite government efforts to cure the annual scourge after the devastating 1998 floods.

Beijing banned the logging that had stripped the upper reaches of major rivers bare and embarked on a huge reafforestation campaign.

The controversial Three Gorges Dam is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but that will not be finished until 2009.

Xinhua said about 15,000 soldiers had been drafted in to help fill and stack sandbags around Dongting, China's second biggest freshwater lake and a major overspill for the Yangtze, as the flood peak churns ever nearer.

"The flood peak will hit Dongting on the 25th," a flood control official said on Thursday.

The economic impact of more than a week of torrential rain is already evident in China's top rice-growing province. Analysts have already cut estimates of the country's rice crop this year.

The biggest danger is from the Xiangjiang, which flows through Changsha. It is now more than two metres above its flood-warning levels for the first time on record and still rising.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager