Swollen lake leads to mass evacuation

CHINESE authorities have evacuated 600,000 people from around the dangerously swollen Dongting Lake as it threatens to engulf millions more, state media said yesterday.

Floods in the southern province of Hunan, where local officials say hundreds of thousands of people are trying to prevent Dongting spilling over, had already killed at least 16 people, the China Daily reported.

The newspaper gave no details of where or how the people died, but said 8.4 million were affected by floods.

Local officials were not able to confirm the figures for evacuees or casualties.

The official Xinhua news agency said more than a million people were piling sandbags and checking for breaches in hundreds of miles of embankments around Dongting that protect 10 million people living in a region of flat, fertile farmland.

The China Daily quoted the Ministry of Civil Affairs as saying 27,000 houses had collapsed and one million acres of crops were damaged in Hunan, but it did not specify where.

The crisis point is expected tomorrow, when a flood crest surging down the Yangtze River sweeps into Dongting, a body of water the size of Luxembourg which was nine feet above its flood warning level yesterday, a local official said.

“The waters on Dongting have reached 34.72 meters,” or 114 feet, a local official said, adding he was ordered not to speak to reporters.

Foreign reporters have been allowed to go to Hunan'’s capital, Changsha, but not yet given permission to visit Dongting.

The provincial government was preparing for the worst, clearing roads so that relief goods, like tents for those driven from their homes, could get through, state media said.

Two cities, Changsha and Wuhan, with a combined population of 13 million, are also at risk.

Already, some 3,000 people in Changsha, which stands on the banks of one of four swollen rivers feeding into Dongting, have been forced from their homes on an island as it virtually disappeared under water.

“Some people have been clearing out, others are going back to collect their stuff,” said fisherman Duan Xuicheng. “I’ve been taking them back and forth from morning until night.”

Those still there were either up to their waists in water or taking refuge on the second floor of their homes.

China’s summer floods have already claimed the lives of more than 900 people despite government efforts to cure the annual scourge after 4,000 died in 1998 in the worst flooding in decades.

Beijing banned the logging which had stripped the upper reaches of China's major rivers bare and embarked on a huge reafforestation campaign.

The controversial Three Gorges Dam is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but that will not be finished until 2009.

Xinhua said some 15,000 soldiers had been drafted in to help fill and stack sandbags around Dongting, China's second biggest freshwater lake and a major overspill for the Yangtze, as the flood peak churns ever nearer.

"The flood peak will hit Dongting on the 25th," a flood control official said on Thursday.

Dongting - which covers about 1,000 square miles - is at its fullest in three years but still short of its historical high of 118 feet seen in 1998.

The economic impact of more than a week of torrential rain is already evident in China's top rice-growing province. Analysts have already cut their estimates of the country's rice crop this year.

The biggest danger is from the Xiangjiang, which flows through Changsha. It is now more than two meters above its flood-warning levels for the first time on record and still rising.