An army of Chinese soldiers and civilians raced against time yesterday to stop a giant lake bursting its banks and sending floodwaters across an area that is home to millions.
About 900,000 people in the southern province of Hunan piled up sandbags as a crest of floodwater from days of incessant rain surged down the Yangtze River towards the dangerously swollen Dongting Lake, local officials said.
The flood surge was expected to reach the lake -- -- where waters are rising inexorably -- by Sunday.
If Dongting, about the size of Luxembourg, bursts its banks, water could wash across flat fertile farmlands where 10 million people live.
Two cities, Changsha and Wuhan, with a combined population of 13 million, are also at risk. Hundreds of kilometers of embankments have to be watched round the clock for breaches to be plugged.
People worked around the banks of the lake and along four swollen rivers that feed it after the provincial government declared a flood emergency for the first time since 1998.
"They have surrounded the lake," said a flood control official in Changsha, the provincial capital about 100km from Dongting. "There are 900,000 people fighting the floods. There are people everywhere."
Television showed them piling sandbags around the lake, a major overspill for the Yangtze.
In Changsha, some 3,000 people had evacuated an island in the middle of the Xiangjiang river, one of the four feeding Dongting, which was almost completely submerged under water.
Soldiers and fishermen ferried people to higher ground in wooden boats. Others waded through their homes in water more than waist deep or took refuge on second-floor patios.
"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."
The worst is yet to come. The Yangtze flood peak is still surging through neighboring Hubei Province and will not reach Dongting until Sunday, another flood control official said.
"The flood peak will hit Dongting on the 25th, pushing its waters up to 35m," said one flood control official.
Dongting rose to 34.57m on Thursday, 2.57m above the flood warning level, state TV reported.
Water levels could match those in 1998, when the worst floods in decades killed more than 4,000 people after the Yangtze and Dongting burst their banks, the China Daily said.
With more than 900 people killed this year already, government officials have said that this year's toll could exceed that figure.
Traffic was being restricted in some areas to ensure relief supplies, like 1,850 tents for some of those expected to be driven from their homes, got through unhindered.
Dongting is China's second largest freshwater lake and one of two major catchments on the Yangtze, which floods almost every year as it meets a network of tributaries and lakes in the big rice-producing provinces of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi.
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