Fri, Jun 24, 2005 page5

• China's floods `worst in a century'

  • AP
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  Nearly 900,000 people have been evacuated from two regions of southern China where at least 46 have died in flooding that was the worst in a century for some areas, the government said yesterday.

  An additional 26 people were missing and some 10,000 stranded by rising floodwaters in the mountainous Guangxi region on China's southern coast and Fujian Province, the National Flood Prevention and Anti-Drought Headquarters announced.

  In parts of Guangxi, the flooding was the worst in a century, while the inundation along the Min River in Fujian was the most severe in two decades, a spokesman for the flood agency, Cheng Dianlong, said on the state television midday news.

  

  A resident walks on the debris of a house destroyed by a landslide in a village in Heyuan, in south China's Guangdong Province yesterday. Nearly 900,000 people have been evacuated from two regions of southern China where at least 46 have died in flooding that was the worst in a century for some areas.

  PHOTO: AP

  China suffers hundreds of flooding deaths every summer in its south and northeast. The impact of seasonal rains is magnified by environmental damage from decades of intensive farming and tree-cutting that have left denuded hillsides unable to trap rain.

  flood plains

  Millions of people live in vulnerable areas on reclaimed former flood plains.

  In Guangxi, some 42,000 people have been evacuated from low-lying areas of the industrial city of Wuzhou in case a surging river that flows through the city overwhelms protective dikes, said Cheng.

  A total of 570,000 people were evacuated from flood-prone areas in Guangxi, while 320,000 were evacuated in Fujian, Cheng said.

  Authorities were air-dropping food and drinking water to 10,000 stranded people near Wuzhou, Cheng said. He said they weren't in "life-threatening danger."

  The director of water resources for Wuzhou was dismissed Wednesday for failing to "resolutely carry out orders for flood prevention," the official Xinhua News Agency said.

  Photos in newspapers showed soldiers and police rowing boatloads of residents down flooded streets.

  Elsewhere in Guangxi, flooding was reported in the popular tourist town of Yangshuo, which attracts thousands of visitors a year to its finger-like limestone peaks.

  death toll

  The deaths reported yesterday raised to more than 180 the total number of fatalities in China's three-week-old summer flood season.

  Elsewhere, nearly 50 deaths were reported earlier in flooding in Fujian Province.

  In the northeast, some 117 people, mostly schoolchildren, were killed when floodwaters destroyed a village schoolhouse in Heilongjiang Province.
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