Mass mobilisation to battle Chinese floods
China has mobilised almost a million people to shore up dykes that protect six cities and dozens of villages from a huge, rain-swollen lake.
Authorities said they had evacuated about 1,000 families around Lake Dongting in Hunan province and would be moving more.
In Hunan, where more than 200 deaths have been reported, local officials were given emergency powers this week to commandeer labour and materials to reinforce anti-flood barriers.
The waters of Lake Dongting and the Xiangjiang River, which flows through the provincial capital of Changsha, are near all-time highs. Officials worry that they could burst embankments and inundate villages in densely populated farm areas.
About 800,000 residents and more than 8,000 soldiers were at work in six cities shoring up dykes, said an official at the Hunan province propaganda office. The 1,560-square-mile lake - bigger than Luxembourg - is surrounded by 580 miles of dykes.
Lake Dongting has caused chronic flooding for centuries. It connects to both the giant, flood-prone Yangtze and to rivers that carry water from Hunan’s southern mountains, and rises with their flow in the rainy season.
Conditions have grown more dangerous over the centuries as settlers used dykes to reclaim farmland from the lake, shrinking its size and leaving little room to expand.
Across China, nearly 1,000 people have died in flooding and landslides triggered by torrential rains this summer.
It has been the deadliest rainy season since 1998, when 4,150 people were killed in areas along the Yangtze River in central China and in the northeast.
Elsewhere in Asia, rescuers in Nepal were waiting for rains to stop so they could reach a village where at least 65 people are feared dead in a landslide.
More than 1,000 people have been killed and about 25 million others forced from their homes since June by torrential rains in Nepal, neighbouring areas of India and the low-lying nation of Bangladesh. Almost 500 of those deaths were in Nepal.
