Floods and landslides triggered by torrential downpours in China have left scores of people dead and missing in recent days, officials said yesterday as water levels in major rivers reached dangerous highs.
Eight people were confirmed dead and 57 were still missing after landslides on Sunday buried parts of the city of Ankang in the northern province of Shaanxi, the local government said on its Web site.
Water levels on the Han River in Ankang reached 50-year highs after rains which began on Friday pummeled the region, toppling more than 6,000 homes and forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, the government said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Local authorities were scrambling to organize search and rescue operations, while the exact toll was still being compiled, it added.
In neighboring Sichuan Province, the Jialing and the Qu rivers, both tributaries of the Yangtze, exceeded warning levels by up to 9m, flooding numerous towns and cities, press reports said.
State television showed the swollen rivers overflowing banks and inundating urban areas with brown, muddy water, forcing residents to evacuate or seek shelter on the upper floors of buildings.
At least 123 people have been killed, are missing or believed buried because of floods, landslides and other rain-related disasters in Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces since last Thursday, with more than 700,000 evacuated, the Civil Affairs Ministry said.
That toll appeared to include the Ankang landslides.
It adds to several hundred already reported killed or missing in floods nationwide this year, especially last month, when China began experiencing some of its worst flooding in more than a decade.
Persistent heavy rainfall has also caused water along the Yangtze — the nation’s longest river — to exceed danger levels, the government said yesterday.
State media reports said water levels in the upper reaches of the Yangtze had already surpassed those of 1998, when more than 4,150 people were killed and 18 million evacuated in China’s worst flooding in recent memory.
The massive water flow on the Yangtze was also posing the biggest challenge to the Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest hydroelectric project — since it was completed in 2006, the China Daily newspaper reported.
The dam is facing a major test of the flood control function that was one of the key justifications for its construction.
Engineers have raised the rate at which water is being sluiced out of the reservoir, to make room for new waves of floodwaters expected this week.
“The levels of this flooding will be higher than the historic floods of 1954 and 1998,” said Wei Shanzhong (魏山忠), head of the Flood Control and Drought Administration office for the Yangtze River. “The rain in the gorges area will have an immediate affect on the water flow, to about 70,000m³ [per second].”
When the flood-tide hits, locks that allow shipping on the reservoir up to the city of Chongqing are closed if the water comes faster than 45,000m³ per second, the China Daily said.
Even if the dam succeeds in its role of holding back deadly floodwaters there may still be problems downstream, where continuous rains have also weakened dikes.
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