Yahoo News 19 Jun 10;
BEIJING (AFP) – More than a million people living along rivers in China's south have been evacuated with water rising to dangerous levels, state media said Saturday, as torrential rains left at least 88 dead.
The government said more than 1.4 million residents living on river banks and in low-lying areas had had to move, according to the official China Daily.
Zhang Zhitong, deputy director of the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, said China's second-largest waterway, the Pearl River, which crosses the south, had breached warning marks on Thursday.
Torrential and virtually unrelenting rain has battered large swathes of China's south since Sunday, triggering devastating floods and landslides that have killed 88 people.
The official Xinhua news agency reported that, in the southeastern province of Fujian alone, 31 people had died in rain-triggered landslides.
Photos on China News Service showed people in Fujian's Gutian county wearing lifejackets and wading deep in water through flooded streets.
State television broadcast images of a bridge in another Fujian town collapsing as water raged underneath it, and in neighbouring Guangdong province, houses were shown almost entirely submerged.
Meanwhile, diggers in nearby Jiangxi were seen clearing roads of huge rocks caused by landslides and workers hung off poles, working at restoring electricity for residents.
Rescue workers in another town in Jiangxi were seen throwing ropes across a raging river to help people cross to the other side, as they also fetched children stuck in a kindergarten and put them in a small boat.
According to the latest statement from the nation's civil affairs ministry, 48 people were still missing in eight provinces and regions in the south and the cost of the disaster had now reached 11 billion yuan (1.6 billion dollars).
A total of 155,000 houses had been damaged -- almost half of which had collapsed -- and more than 500,000 hectares of crops had been affected, the ministry said.
Authorities have raised the level of their emergency response as rescue and flood-prevention work continues, it added.
The National Meteorological Centre warned on Saturday of more rainstorms to come, a day after it issued an orange storm alert -- just one level lower than the nation's most serious red alert.
"There will be heavy rain over the next three days, and flood-control work will face enormous challenges," it said in a statement, adding that some of the rainfall in the south was up to three times greater than normal years.
