China floods spark evacuations, more rain to come

BEIJING, July 13 (Reuters) Hundreds of thousands of villagers in east China were fleeing the worst flood on a major river in more than 50 years today, facing shortages of medicine, fuel and food with more rain forecast, media said.

One province was planning a 40-km (24-mile) great fence to keep back hundreds of millions of rats escaping a flooded lake.

Emergency workers in the dirt-poor eastern province of Anhui breached another dyke in a bid to ease pressure on the Huai River, suffering its worst flood since 1954, Xinhua news agency reported.

Villagers living inside the walls of the Shiyaowan dyke were evacuated, with officials using sirens and troops to round up about 10,000 residents to take them to higher ground.

Six similar rural ''flood reserve areas'' had already been deliberately submerged in Anhui where at least 27 people have been killed so far in floods, landslides or house collapses triggered by heavy rains in the past two weeks.

A summer of torrential rains across the country has fed floods and landslides that had killed 403 people and left 105 missing by yesterday, causing economic losses of 32 billion yuan (4.23 billion dollar).

In the Mengwa area, where homes and crops belonging to 157,800 people have been flooded, evacuated residents faced shortages of medicine, disinfectants, fuel and vegetables.

''We've been eating green peppers and soy beans harvested just before the water rose for days,'' villager Qiao Rulan was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Authorities have been shipping flour, rice, noodles and cooking oil to temporary shelters isolated by flood waters more than two metres deep which used to be villages and farmland.

''The villagers are also worried that it will be difficult to cook because they will run out of wood. They hope the government can provide some coal,'' Xinhua said.

Tens of thousands of People's Liberation Army troops were helping rescue efforts along the Huai, which originates in the central province of Henan and runs east through densly populated but underdeveloped parts of Henan, Anhui and coastal Jiangsu.

Jiangsu had mobilised more than 200,000 people for 24-hour inspection of Huai embankments as flood peaks approached, Xinhua said.

Downpours since late June have also killed at least 42 people in the southwestern province of Sichuan in serious landslides and flooding. Residents now face arduous tasks of clean-up and reconstruction, state media said.

Forecasters warned today that heavy downpours in coming days across Henan as well as southwest and central China could bring more floods and landslides.

Officials in the central province of Hunan were raising 6 million yuan to build a 40-km (24-mile), one-metre-high fence to stifle future rat invasions as 2 billion rodents fleeing the rising waters of the Dongting Lake plagued farmland.

The current plague had cost Yueyang city 6 million yuan in economic losses, prompting residents to cull the rats with anything from clubs and shovels to poison, the Beijing News said.

REUTERS SW PM1020