- "...five to seven more typhoons
due in the next three months."
-
-
- SHAOXING, China -- Chinese officials say the nation's worst flooding in
40 years, caused by a fast-swelling Yangtze River, now threatens to overwhelm
several large cities in the central part of the country.
-
- The army is evacuating more than half
a million people from an area in Hubei Province, state news organizations
reported Saturday.
-
- They said increasingly desperate officials
there might have to blow up several dikes and deliberately inundate millions
of acres of farmland to divert water that endangers larger cities downstream.
-
- The floods have killed more than 2,000
people, destroyed more than 5 million homes and indirectly affected over
240 million people, or nearly one-fifth of the country's population, according
to official figures.
-
- Authorities have mobilized millions of
soldiers and government officials to help in rescue efforts.
-
- In Hubei, where a state of emergency
was declared on Thursday, floods have already broken through more than
100 separate embankments.
-
- Now, as flooding begins to threaten Wuhan,
a major industrial center with seven million residents, authorities are
frantically searching for ways to divert part of the Yangtse River's overflow.
-
- In the Jingjiang plain, more than 300,000
residents have already been evacuated with the help of the army, the New
China News Agency reported, and 200,000 more are expected to be moved.
-
- Local governments will compensate families
whose homes are destroyed, the agency promised.
-
- Flooding occurs virtually every summer
in China. In the past, official statistics on flood casualties have sometimes
been unreliable because local officials have exaggerated conditions in
hopes of receiving additional money from Beijing.
-
- The central authorities, in turn, often
use natural disasters as a political rallying cry nationwide.
-
- Flooding in 1996, for instance, was also
called the worst in decades by officials in badly affected areas.
-
- This year's flooding appears to affect
more areas than the floods of 1996, but it is difficult to assess accurately
because the authorities are barring foreign reporters from badly flooded
areas.
-
- Saturday night, state television broadcast
pictures of soldiers venturing into fast-rushing water to try to rebuild
dikes with canvas bags filled with sand and rocks.
-
- Other soldiers were shown ferrying residents
out of badly stricken areas in rowboats and senior officers were seen exhorting
the troops to greater efforts.
-
- Warning that soldiers risked contracting
cholera and other diseases from contaminated water, the authorities reported
that all manner of preventative measures were being taken, including traditional
Chinese potions.
-
- According to official accounts, the Yangtze
River has not flooded so badly since 1954, when 30,000 people died.
-
- This year, most of the 2,000 people reported
killed died in landslides and mud flows that swallowed houses and villages,
said Fan Baojun, Deputy Minister of Civil Affairs.
-
- An unknown number of soldiers have died
fighting the floods.
-
- More than 200 people were washed away
when a dike burst Saturday in Jiayu County, in Hubei Province, the official
China Daily reported.
-
- So far, the newspaper said, the bodies
of five soldiers and eight civilians have been recovered.
-
- Some 40,000 people were stranded near
Jiujiang, in neighboring Jiangxi Province, when flooding from a collapsed
dike left them surrounded by water, the New China News Agency reported.
-
- Farther downstream on the Yangtze, in
Anhui Province, an onslaught of water arrived from two sides as the river
swelled in the west and a typhoon brought heavy rains in the east.
-
- In Hunan Province, farther south, 2.3
million soldiers and civilians worked to build flood defenses in case the
typhoon caused rain there.
-
- Concerned about long-term weather forecasts,
the New China News Agency quoted meteorologists' predictions that five
to seven typhoons would hit China in the next three months.
-
- Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated
from their homes in Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces were living in makeshift
tents provided by the army, surviving on government supplies of rice, state
news organizations also reported.
-
- The New China News Agency said that another
danger had emerged from thieves trying to take advantage of flooded homes
and unprotected evacuees.
-
- Night patrols have been organized in
several areas, it said, to prevent theft from submerged houses and from
refugees.
|
