Workers race to fight China floods
Authorities said they had evacuated about 1,000 families around Dongting Lake in Hunan province and would be moving more.
In the town of Chenglingji on the lake's east shore, buildings outside the town's flood barrier stood in five feet of water and residents with boats were ferrying neighbours to dry land. Some with two-storey homes moved all their belongings upstairs.
"Of course, it's a bunch of trouble. But what can we do?" said Wang Guoqing, a dock worker who had moved his family upstairs.
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 along the Yangtze River in central China and in the northeast.
Elsewhere in Asia, rescuers in Nepal were waiting Thursday 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 since June by rains in Nepal, neighboring areas of India and the low-lying nation of Bangladesh. Some 494 of those deaths were in Nepal.
Some 25 million people have been forced from their homes in the region although in places of South Asia, such relocations are routine as people wait out the flooding.
The bad weather also hindered rescue efforts after a light plane crashed yesterday carrying tourists near the western Nepalese town of Pokhara. When rescuers finally reached the wreckage, they found that all 15 people aboard had been killed 13 Germans, an American, a Briton and three Nepalese crew members.
Heavy rains in Tibet forced the airport in the Himalayan territory's capital, Lhasa, to close for nearly two days, stranding some 3,000 passengers.
Flights were suspended Tuesday afternoon and resumed Thursday morning, said Li Dong, an employee of the airport office. He said about 1,000 passengers were awaiting flights.
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 Dongting Lake 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 dikes, said an official at the Hunan province publicity office. He would give only his surname, Gong.
About 1,000 homes near Dongting Lake have been evacuated, said an official of the Hunan Civil Affairs Bureau who gave only his surname, Liu. The 1,560-square-mile lake bigger than Luxembourg is surrounded by 580 miles of dikes.
In Yueyang, a city of 600,000 people on the lake shore south of Chenglingji, most of the city was dry but water stood doorknob-high in a handful of houses along the waterfront. The city's busy lakefront pier still bustled with fishing boats and arriving ferries.
Dongting Lake 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.
