People across China were warned on Tuesday to prepare for imminent flooding even worse than that thought to have killed almost 800 people last month, as the full force of the rainy season looms.
The warning came as aid workers said earlier flash floods had left some rice paddies farmed for generations unusable, and local populations severely traumatised.
The main areas under threat during the rainy season, which officially begins in July, are around the traditionally flood-prone Yangtze River, especially in central and eastern China.
”It is high time for water levels in the Yangtze and other main rivers to rise as more rain is predicted for this month, the beginning of the major flood season throughout China,” a senior flood control official told Tuesday’s China Daily newspaper.
Areas most at risk were around the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, said Deng Jian, deputy head of the Office of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
Adding to concern is the imminent arrival of Typhoon Rammasun, currently lurking off Taiwan and expected to bring heavy rain to central and eastern parts of the mainland within three days, the Central Meteorological Observatory in Beijing told AFP.
Rivers and lakes are already perilously close to danger levels. Dongting Lake in the central province of Hunan, which acts as a buffer for the Yangtze, was just one centimetre below its 32-metre flood warning level, the state Xinhua news agency said early this week.
The Red Cross said areas around the Yangtze had been battered by heavy thunderstorms on Tuesday and more were forecast to come. In some places, water levels were already above those recorded in 1998, when devastating floods around the Yangtze killed 4 000 people, although river banks have been reinforced since then, the group said.
Thorir Gudmundsson of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Beijing said further flooding was inevitable.
”We are preparing for what might happen. There are medical teams on alert who are ready to move in to prevent any outbreaks of disease, which is what kills the most people during floods,” he said.
At the same time, the terrible effects of flash floods and landslides which ripped through a number of provinces earlier this month are still emerging.
Gudmundsson, who returned on Tuesday from the west-central province of Guizhou, said many people there appeared severely traumatised.
Hours of torrential rain on June 15 caused flash flooding in areas usually not at risk, where many people farmed in dry river valleys, he said.
”Floods, landslides and rocks just crashed through houses and onto fields,” he said. ”The people are very much afraid now. It is not statistically very likely there will be more floods — people said there had not been flooding like it for 150 years — but they are very afraid, like people who have been in an earthquake.
”Some are exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, waking up in the night sweating.”
Gudmundsson said that while some farmers had been able to replant destroyed crops within days, others had lost much of their land for good under the torrent of rocks.
”Some rice fields were completely destroyed. They had been used for generations and now they can probably never be used again,” he said.
Around 70-million people were affected by the floods in June, with around 700 000 left homeless, official figures showed. – Sapa-AFP