Almost 250 people are confirmed dead after a fortnight of torrential rains across large parts of China, state media said on Sunday.
One of the worst hit areas was southwestern Yunnan province, where more bodies were discovered over the weekend as new disasters struck, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Five people were killed and 10 were missing after a landslide buried work huts at the construction site of a hydropower station on the Lancang river in western Yunnan Saturday, Xinhua said.
Torrential rain and floods have left 106 dead and 72 missing in the mountainous province since the beginning of the month, according to the China Youth Daily.
In Yunnan’s Xinping county, the toll after rain-induced landslides cut a 50-metre chasm in the side of a mountain has risen to 33 dead and 30 missing.
”I have never seen such a terrible natural disaster in my life,” Xinhua quoted a 70-year-old woman as saying.
The death toll from an earlier landslide in Yanjin, in northernmost Yunnan, rose to 22 on Saturday, when one more body was found. Seven others remain missing.
Xinhua said there was little hope of finding any survivors among the missing from various disasters in Yunnan.
In eastern Zhejiang province, 21 were confirmed dead and eight missing after powerful mountain torrents triggered by heavy rain hit dozens of villages, Xinhua said.
Altogether 89 000 people in the province have been affected by the torrents, while 4 210 houses and over 6 400 hectares of farmland had been destroyed, the agency said.
In several places the torrents had caused landslides that had buried roads and bridges in mud, cutting off communication and traffic.
In central Hunan, another badly-hit province, the death toll rose to 108 with 38-million people affected, according to a provincial official.
In northern Hunan, water levels in Dongting Lake, China’s second-largest freshwater lake, was reaching danger levels, Xinhua said.
As of late as Saturday, the water in the lake had reached 31,94 metres, just six centimetres short of the flood-warning mark, the agency said, citing Hunan flood control officials.
Dongting, which is on the flood-prone Yangtze and acts as a buffer for the river, is expected to swell further in the coming days as more rain falls, the officials told Xinhua.
By next Thursday, the water level in the lake could reach as high as 33,5 metres, they warned.
Another section of the Yangtze, at the Three Gorges dam site in the central province of Hubei, was closed for navigation, state media reported previously.
In the northwestern desert region of Xinjiang, which is normally dry and therefore ill-prepared for floods, several counties had been hit by floods after unusually heavy rain, Xinhua said.
The situation had been aggravated by high temperatures that had brought large amounts of melt water from the mountains, Xinhua said.
While no casualties had as yet been reported from Xinjiang, more flooding could occur in the coming days as more rain was likely, an anti-flood official said according to Xinhua.
On the whole, more than 100-million Chinese have been affected by the floods this year.
National anti-flood officials have expressed fears that this summer’s flooding could prove even worse than that of 1998.
Four years ago, China experienced some of the most severe floods in its recent history, killing about
4 000 people. – Sapa-AFP