Engorged with more heavy rains, China’s mighty Yangtze River is cresting again, bringing fears of further destruction as seasonal floods that have already left more than 140 people dead or missing have grown in force since last month.
The rains are putting renewed pressure on the massive Three Gorges Dam that straddles the river upstream of Wuhan in Hubei Province.
The rate of flow in the reservoir behind the dam would hit a record for the year on Friday night, at 55,000m3 per second, Xinhua News Agency said.
Photo: AFP
The inflow peaked on Saturday at 61,000m3 per second, before easing to 46,000m3 per second by Sunday night, Xinhua later reported.
Rivers in the Yangtze system have broken their banks in places. A helicopter was used to drop stones into a breach to block the inrushing waters in Hubei.
Crews were dispatched with poles to probe waterlogged embankments for weakness and thousands of sandbags were being filled in preparation for more breaches that would need to be swiftly closed.
Water rose to the level of first-floor windows in exposed ancient towns and crops were completely inundated around vast Poyang Lake, a network of waterways that empty into the Yangtze below Wuhan.
On the lake’s eastern edge in Jiangxi Province, 45-year-old Xu Yongxiang said that his village of Liufang had been without running water or electricity for almost a week.
Although it was time for the rice harvest, that crop, along with cotton, corn and beans, was now under water.
“We do not have one inch of dry ground. It has all been flooded,” Xu, who sells pork for a living, was quoted as saying on the China Youth Daily’s microblog.
Flooding since the beginning of the month has forced evacuations of about 1.8 million people in 24 provinces, mainly in southern China. Direct losses attributed to flooding are estimated at more than 49 billion yuan (US$7 billion), the Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management said.
Floodwaters reached as high as 1.4m in Linshui County in Sichuan Province, the ministry’s rescue department reported.
Seasonal flooding strikes large parts of China each year, especially in its central and southern regions, but conditions this year have been especially bad. Major cities have so far been spared, but concerns have risen over Wuhan and other downstream metropolises.
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