China flood waters slowly start to recede

Flood waters a storey high began to recede slowly in the southern Chinese industrial city of Wuzhou yesterday with the death toll from flooding and landslides nationwide put at 567 so far this year.

A further 165 people are still missing, state media said.

Torrential rain in southern China has caused rivers to burst their banks and triggered mudslides, killing at least 124 people and leaving 69 missing in the last week alone, Xinhua news agency said.

In Wuzhou, in the southern Guangxi region, houses on the banks of the Xijiang river were flooded up to their roofs and downtown residents had moved food and other essentials to higher storeys or fled to higher ground.

Traffic on the narrow streets was composed of inner tubes, upturned beds and doors turned into makeshift rafts, with some people lucky enough to have a rowing boat acting as ferrymen, at a price.

"It seems they are used to this happening," one foreign witness said.

Others were doing business selling vegetables from boats, with upper floor residents throwing down string or rope for the hawkers to tie their wares to.

President Hu Jintao urged governments at all levels to be "conscientious in their service" to fight the floods which have spread across the south.

But floods and drought are a fact of life for much of China, killing hundreds every summer.

"So far this year, the loss is worse than average, but still below the figures in 1991 and 1998" when devastating floods wreaked havoc across eastern and central China, the China Daily quoted a source with the Civil Affairs Ministry as saying.

And southern Guangdong province's Pearl River Delta, a crucial engine of China's economic growth and home to 10 million people, was braced for the onslaught of the "highest floods in local history" from the swollen Xijiang river, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

"Summer floods usually last just one day, but this week the floods came and went and came back five times. Now the waters are finally starting to recede," a flood prevention official from the Fujian city of Nanping said by telephone.

More than 1.5 million people had been evacuated in six southern provinces, where the week's floods had caused over 13.3 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in direct economic losses and inundated huge tracts of crop land, state television said.

Deforestation compounds the problem, as torrential rains trigger rock slides and mud flows off bare mountainsides.

Treeless hills were blamed in part for a flash flood that devastated a primary school in northeastern Heilongjiang province earlier this month which killed 117 people - 105 of them children. ($1=8.276 Yuan).