Dazed Chinese were navigating flooded city and village streets on upturned beds and picking through the rubble of their shattered homes yesterday as the nationwide flood season death toll rose to 563.
Torrential rain in southern China has bloated rivers over their bursting points and triggered mudslides, killing at least 124 people and leaving 69 missing this week alone, state television said.
Worse could come, with Guangdong Province's Pearl River Delta, a crucial engine of China's economic growth and home to 10 million people, bracing for the onslaught of the "highest floods in local history" from the swollen Xijiang river, Xinhua news agency said.
PHOTO: AFP
"Even when the floods start to recede, levees in the area will have been submerged a long time, so accidents could happen anytime," Chen Fenyong, an official from Guangdong's Foshan city, was quoted as saying.
Flooding in parts of Guangxi Province has been the worst in a century, state media said.
In the hard-hit industrial city of Wuzhou, houses on the banks of the Xijiang river were flooded up to their roofs and downtown residents were forced to move to upper-storey apartments or to flee to higher ground where many were living under any cover they could find.
Instead of cars, traffic was composed of upturned beds, cupboards and doors turned into makeshift rafts, with people paddling between dangling, bare electricity wires seeking food and other necessities.
One Wuzhou resident said flood alarms had stopped ringing and water levels were dropping. People's Liberation Army troops were sent to stack sandbags and try to keep the waters at bay. But the situation in surrounding rural areas, many as yet to be reached, appeared grim.
"Some old villagers couldn't bear to leave their homes, and because there were no rescuers here, they died in their houses," a villager named Hu Jinhuan said.
In another devastated Guangxi village, Hu Haiyin sorted through mud-covered timbers, computer parts and other remnants of his former home. Many mud houses like Hu's were levelled. His 43-year-old son died in the flooding on Tuesday.
"We had no warning at all. We are hoping that international aid groups will help us, but they should just give us any aid directly, they shouldn't give it to the government," he said.
"Summer floods usually last just one day, but this week the floods came and went and came back five times. Now the waters are finally starting to recede," a flood prevention official from Nanping city said by telephone.
More than 1.5 million people had been evacuated in six southern provinces, where the week's floods had caused over 13.3 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) in direct economic losses and inundated huge tracts of crop land, state TV said.
Most damage in Guangdong appeared to be to farms, with export-oriented factories largely unaffected, said Ruby Zhu, China economist for the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.
"It doesn't seem serious now," she said. "But if it gets more serious, we're not sure what will happen in Guangdong Province."
Macau was on high flood alert, Xinhua said. Macau authorities said the rain-swollen Pearl river could rise to as much as 1m above normal, Xinhua said.
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