Tens of thousands of victims of China’s earthquake were evacuated yesterday as torrential rain lashed the region, triggering flood warnings on major rivers including the Yangtze and the Pearl.
Heavy downpours have battered large parts of eastern and southern China, leaving at least 65 dead or missing, and adding to the misery in Sichuan Province.
Up to 70,000 people in Wenchuan County at the epicenter of the May 12 earthquake were being moved because of the risk of rock and mudslides brought on with the onset of the rainy season in Sichuan, the Beijing News said.
PHOTO: AFP
“Wenchuan has already entered the rainy season and the rain will weaken even more the already brittle mountain sides, making the situation even worse,” the paper said.
Xinhua news agency said about 50,000 people living in mountainous villages around Wenchuan County seat would be moved to camps already housing tens of thousands of other quake victims.
Last month’s magnitude-8 earthquake has left up to 87,000 dead or missing and up to 5 million homeless in Sichuan.
Wenchuan was flattened during the quake with early rescue and relief efforts mostly flown in because of impassable roads in the area.
Local weather reports said the Wenchuan area could expect thunderstorms for the next three days.
In China as a whole, heavy rains have left at least 57 people dead and eight missing across nine provinces over the past 10 days, the government said.
More than 1.27 million people have been evacuated in the hardest hit areas, with large swathes of farmland submerged and economic losses already totaling more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion), it said.
Rising waters on China’s major rivers prompted the government to issue emergency orders on Sunday as the affected provinces and regions scrambled to prepare for more torrential rains.
Waters on a Yangtze tributary in Henan Province were up to 4.7m over warning levels, E Jingping, head of the state’s flood prevention headquarters, said in an emergency order posted on its Web site yesterday.
The situation on the Pearl River in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces was the most pressing, he said, with water levels at a 20-year high.
On the Xijiang River, a tributary of the Pearl in Guangxi, water levels had surpassed warning levels by 6.8m, he said.
Almost 18 million people had been affected by flooding while more than 141,000 homes had been wrecked or damaged, the government said.
Rains were forecast to continue to pound southern China in the coming days, with rising river levels threatening towns in Jiangxi, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces, the state meteorological bureau said.
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