Flooding triggered by torrential rains killed at least 44 people and forced the evacuation of about 330,000 in a mountainous region of southern China, the government said yesterday.
The flooding in the Guangxi region also left another 23 people missing and wrecked more than 20,000 houses, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing disaster officials.
The area has been pounded by heavy rain since Saturday, causing swollen rivers to overflow their banks, Xinhua said.
Some 333,000 people have been evacuated from flood-prone areas to higher ground, the agency said.
The Wuzhou River was 8.5m above its danger level at midday yesterday, Xinhua said.
As the waters rose, the city of Wuzhou evacuated 20,000 of its residents, China Central Television (CCTV) reported, as it showed images of police helping elderly residents.
Along the river, thousands were working to fortify its banks and dams by piling up bags filled with earth, CCTV said.
Notices on the mass evacuation were posted on walls in the area, warning sirens blared in the dark of night and Wuzhou residents began to load up cars, trucks and carts with valuables and flee the area for higher ground.
"In the face of these floods, the attitude of the government is to make sure that no one is killed," Ren Kuikang, chief of the Wuzhou flood control and drought relief office, told state television.
With much of southern China now under threat, Premier Wen Jiabao (
Earlier this month, a flash flood swept through a low-lying primary school in Heilongjiang Province, killing 117 people, 105 of them children.
Flooding in Guangxi had killed 24 people and left 23 missing, Xinhua news agency said, citing provincial flood control officials.
More than 330,000 people had been evacuated to higher ground in the region, where the flooding has caused 1.67 billion yuan (US$201 million) in economic losses, damaged 328,000 hectares of crops and toppled more than 20,000 houses, it said.
Flooding damaged another 50,000 houses regionwide.
Authorities had expected the Xijiang, which has risen at a rate of 10cm per hour, to peak on yesterday night at a hydrographic station in Wuzhou.
Heavy rains have killed nine people since Saturday in Guangdong, where a landslide disrupted traffic on a rail line linking China with Hong Kong, Xinhua said.
Rainstorms in Guangdong caused cave-ins on part of the Beijing-Kowloon railway line, forcing dozens of trains to either delay or turn back while repairs were made, it said.
Water levels on two other rivers in Guangxi -- the Qianjiang and Xunjiang -- were above warning levels and the province had suffered nearly US$45 million in economic losses as of Monday due to the recent deluges, Xinhua said, citing local flood control headquarters.
In Fujian Province, floods and landslides had killed 12 and left five missing, it said. In Shunchang County alone in northern Fujian, dozens of landslides had buried nine people, killing five. Three were missing.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
RSS