Nearly 900,000 people have been evacuated from two regions of southern China where at least 46 have died in flooding that was the worst in a century for some areas, the government said yesterday.
An additional 26 people were missing and some 10,000 stranded by rising floodwaters in the mountainous Guangxi region on China's southern coast and Fujian Province, the National Flood Prevention and Anti-Drought Headquarters announced.
In parts of Guangxi, the flooding was the worst in a century, while the inundation along the Min River in Fujian was the most severe in two decades, a spokesman for the flood agency, Cheng Dianlong, said on the state television midday news.
PHOTO: AP
China suffers hundreds of flooding deaths every summer in its south and northeast. The impact of seasonal rains is magnified by environmental damage from decades of intensive farming and tree-cutting that have left denuded hillsides unable to trap rain.
flood plains
Millions of people live in vulnerable areas on reclaimed former flood plains.
In Guangxi, some 42,000 people have been evacuated from low-lying areas of the industrial city of Wuzhou in case a surging river that flows through the city overwhelms protective dikes, said Cheng.
A total of 570,000 people were evacuated from flood-prone areas in Guangxi, while 320,000 were evacuated in Fujian, Cheng said.
Authorities were air-dropping food and drinking water to 10,000 stranded people near Wuzhou, Cheng said. He said they weren't in "life-threatening danger."
The director of water resources for Wuzhou was dismissed Wednesday for failing to "resolutely carry out orders for flood prevention," the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Photos in newspapers showed soldiers and police rowing boatloads of residents down flooded streets.
Elsewhere in Guangxi, flooding was reported in the popular tourist town of Yangshuo, which attracts thousands of visitors a year to its finger-like limestone peaks.
death toll
The deaths reported yesterday raised to more than 180 the total number of fatalities in China's three-week-old summer flood season.
Elsewhere, nearly 50 deaths were reported earlier in flooding in Fujian Province.
In the northeast, some 117 people, mostly schoolchildren, were killed when floodwaters destroyed a village schoolhouse in Heilongjiang Province.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS