Death toll from Chinese floods nears 600 mark

A BUS was swept away by fast, muddy flood waters in south China, the latest in a string of disasters across the country where 536 people have died in floods and landslides this year.

Torrential rain has pushed rivers above their bursting points and triggered mudslides in the past week, killing at least 97 people and leaving 41 missing, state media said yesterday.

As rain inundated the south, the impoverished central province of Anhui was suffering widespread drought and there was a heatwave in the capital, Beijing.

In the hard-hit industrial city of Wuzhou, in the southern Guangxi region, houses on the banks of the Xijiang river have been flooded up to their roofs and residents have been forced to flee to higher ground.

People have fashioned make-shift boats and yesterday were cruising around flooded streets at the level of bare electrical lines seeking food and other necessities.

Eighteen people were missing in Fujian province to the east after flood waters washed a bus off a national highway on Thursday, state media said.

There was no clear death toll in Wuzhou, but locals say some elderly people who refused to evacuate were likely killed when the floods washed in.

And with the flooding set to peak on the Xijiang river and others in south China, there are fears the real disaster has yet to hit.

“More than 100,000 people and soldiers are bracing themselves for the worst peak of the floods on the (Xijiang) river as it passes Guangxi,” an official said.

Some 1.4 million people have been evacuated in six southern provinces, where the week’s floods have caused over 11 billion yuan (€1.1bn) in direct economic losses and inundated huge tracks of crop land, Xinhua news agency said.