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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 today. An additional 49 people were missing and some 10,000 stranded by rising floodwaters in the mountainous Guangxi region on China’s southern coast and Fujian province in the south-east, state media and the National Flood Prvention and Anti-Drought Headquarters announced. In Fujian, a mudslide swept a bus and a car off a road and into a river today near the city of Jian’ou, leaving 23 people missing, the Xinhua News Agency reported. 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, said a spokesman for the flood agency, Cheng Dianlong. China suffers hundreds of flooding deaths every summer in its south and north-east. 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. 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 dykes, 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 yesterday for failing to “resolutely carry out orders for flood prevention”, Xinhua said, without giving details. Photos in newspapers showed soldiers and police rowing boatloads of residents down flooded streets. Guangxi, on China’s southern coast north-west of Hong Kong, is one of the country’s poorest areas. 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. The deaths reported today 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 the south-eastern province of Fujian. In China’s north-east, some 117 people, most of them schoolchildren, were killed when floodwaters destroyed a village schoolhouse in Heilongjiang province. |
| China suffers hundreds of flooding deaths every summer in its south and north-east. 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. |