The death toll from torrential downpours battering China for the past week has reached 132, state media reported yesterday, as more heavy rain was forecast.
Floods and landslides triggered by the summer deluge have left a further 86 people missing while more than 860,000 have been evacuated, state-run television said.
While the death toll was up from 90 on Saturday, the number of evacuees was lower than the previous day’s figure of 1.4 million.
More thunderstorms were forecast from yesterday afternoon late into today, according to the official meteorological bureau.
The cost of the disaster has reached 14.5 billion yuan (US$2.1 billion), state television said. A total of 68,000 houses have collapsed and more than 500,000 hectares of crops have been affected, it said.
Authorities have raised the level of their emergency response as rescue and flood-prevention work continues, the Chinese civil affairs ministry said.
Waters have surged passed safe levels in dozens of rivers, including the Pearl River. The strong storms have collapsed reservoirs, overflowed rivers, caused landslides and power outages and damaged highways.
The flooding follows the worst drought in a century for the southern provinces and regions of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi. It left millions without drinking water and destroyed more than 5 million hectares of crops.
State television broadcast images of submerged crops in Jiangxi Province while other images showed soldiers leading clean-up efforts in parts of Fujian Province.
Images showed overturned cars and people sweeping water and mud out of their shops in Fujian after floodwaters had receded.
Photos on China News Service showed people wading through waist-high water as they tried to cross a flooded bridge in Zhejiang Province.
Others showed people being rescued by helicopter from flood-ravaged Guangxi while others and farmers in Fujian trying to salvage crops damaged in the deluge.
Xinhua news agency also reported that in Fujian alone, 12 people had died in a landslide while seven had been rescued.
The National Meteorological Center warned yesterday of more rainstorms to come, two days after it issued an orange storm alert — just one level lower than the nation’s most serious red alert.
“The scope and intensity of the rain have increased,” it said in a statement on its Web site.
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