Monday, 14-Jul-2003 3:10AMááááá

Story from AFP / Peter Harmsen

BEIJING, July 14 (AFP) - Central China's Hubei province Monday braced for the largest flood crest of the year along the Yangtze River while the swollen Huai River washed away homes and destroyed lives.

As water levels along critical points on the Yangtze were expected to exceed warning lines in Hubei, home to 60 million people, flood control officials were preparing for the worst.

"We're paying special attention to the water level in reservoirs throughout the province," said a flood control official in the provincial capital of Wuhan.

"Seasonal torrential rains and landslides have caused some casualties," she said, but declined to give specific figures.

In Hubei's Zigui county, the death toll from a landslide along Qinggan river, a tributary of the Yangtze, was raised to five, with 19 people missing and feared dead.

The landslide had caused several boats in the river to capsize, sucking 10 people into the raging stream, the Chutian Metropolitan News reported.

[...]

A flood crest on the Huai River was moving east from central China's Anhui province, where a million people have been evacuated, towards Jiangsu province in the east.

An official at the flood prevention office in Anhui's provincial capital of Hefei said 1.8 million workers, officials and soldiers had been commandeered to patrol dykes.

[...]

"It's pretty serious," Niels Juel, Red Cross regional disaster manager, told AFP by telephone from Jiangsu.

"We've seen vast areas where all agricultural land has been washed away. Many aquafarms have also been destroyed."

Juel, who arrived in Jiangsu as Chinese Red Cross donated tents, food and medicine for the disaster victims, said he had visited a school where 600 evacuees were housed in makeshift conditions.

"We heard there are 14 schools like that, with more than 6,000 evacuated people," he said.

Prevention of epidemics was a top concern among officials charged with caring for the hundreds of thousands of evacuees.

More than 9,000 medical workers had been dispatched to Anhui province alone to provide treatment and prevent contagious diseases from breaking out, the China Daily reported.

State-run media suggested that the extent of the flooding was caused partly by lack of preparation, even though Huai has long been known as one of China's most turbulent rivers.

"Flood-control standards of the embankments of the river are relatively low, which puts great pressure on efforts to protect the embankments when floods occur," Luo Zewang, deputy general engineer with the Huai River Water Resources Committee, told Xinhua.

In the southwestern province of Sichuan, 51 people were still missing after tons of mud and rocks engulfed Badi, a mountain village, over the weekend.

However, 71 people who had been trapped by the mudslide had been rescued as of early Monday, Zhao Liyong, a civil affairs official, told AFP by telephone.

http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/ah/Qchina-floods.Rv4q_DlE.html