Surging floodwaters pushed the giant Yangtze River to danger levels on dikes shielding the metropolis of Wuhan yesterday as storms dumped more rain on sodden central China.
No flooding was reported in Wuhan, a city of 7 million people. But the river was 50cm above a level thought to threaten the safety of its dikes, said an official of the Yangtze River Water Resources Committee in the city. She would give only her surname, Sun.
A second crest of floodwaters pouring down the Yangtze from inundated areas upstream is expected to reach Wuhan soon, she said.
"We are watching it closely," she said.
The storms added more water to rain-bloated Dongting Lake, raising the threat to strained dikes that protect hundreds of thousands of homes.
The 3,995km2 lake, China's second-largest, connects to the Yangtze in Hunan Province about 200km upstream from Wuhan.
Yesterday, the lake was 1.7m above safe levels on dikes protecting Yueyang, a city of 600,000 people, said an official of the Hunan Water Resources Bureau. He would give only his surname, Zhou.
Hundreds of thousands of people who live around the lake have been evacuated over the past week. An army of more than 1 million laborers and soldiers raced to reinforce hundreds of kilometers of dikes that surround it.
After days of clear skies, up to 5cm of rain is forecast by today for the northern part of Hunan and the western provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan.
"The worsening weather will certainly bring more threats," said Zhou.
Floods and landslides have killed about 1,000 people across China since the rainy season began in June. More than 200 of those deaths were reported in Hunan.
In Xiangyin, a city on Dongting Lake south of Yueyang, hundreds of farm families were evacuated when the lake flooded low-lying areas, said Chen Zhenfu, general secretary of the Yueyang branch of the Chinese Red Cross.
Soldiers in Xiangyin were racing to repair a leaking dike, said Qi Ding, a motorcycle taxi driver in the town reached by telephone.
"There's still a lot of danger," Qi said.
Thousands of homes along the edge of Dongting Lake have flooded, but most residents are going about life normally.
Yesterday, as lightning streaked the skies, people in Yueyang were going to work, some of them walking barefoot through the rain.
"Of course we're worried about this rain. If this continues, it could get very serious," said a man sitting at a food stall on the waterfront, where puddles were already ankle-deep in some places. He would only give his surname Zhuan.
Xu Bang, a taxi driver, was more optimistic.
"This rain is nothing," Xu said. "Don't worry. This place will never flood."
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