More than 1 million people living along rivers in China’s south have been evacuated with water rising to dangerous levels, Chinese state media said yesterday, as torrential rains left 136 dead or missing.
The government said more than 1.4 million residents living on river banks and in low-lying areas had to move, the official China Daily reported.
Zhang Zhitong, deputy director of the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, said China’s second-largest waterway, the Pearl River, which crosses the south, had breached warning marks on Thursday.
Torrential and virtually unrelenting rain has battered large swathes of China’s south since last Sunday, triggering devastating floods and landslides resulting in 88 confirmed deaths.
The Xinhua news agency reported that, in Fujian Province alone, 25 people had died in rain-triggered landslides and 15 more were missing.
Photos on China News Service showed people in Fujian’s Gutian county wearing lifejackets and wading in deep water through flooded streets.
State television broadcast images of a bridge in another Fujian town collapsing as water raged underneath it, and in Guangdong Province, houses were shown almost entirely submerged.
Meanwhile, diggers in nearby Jiangxi were seen clearing roads of huge rocks caused by landslides and workers hung off poles working at restoring electricity for residents.
According to the latest statement from the nation’s civil affairs ministry, 48 people were still missing in eight provinces and regions in the south and the cost of the disaster had now reached 11 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion).
Authorities have raised the level of their emergency response as rescue and flood-prevention work continues, the ministry said.
The National Meteorological Center warned yesterday of more rainstorms to come, a day after it issued an orange storm alert — one level lower than the most serious red alert.
“There will be heavy rain over the next three days, and flood-control work will face enormous challenges,” it said in a statement, adding that some of the rainfall in the south was up to three times greater than in normal years.
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