Aug 22, 2002 5 min read

CHANGSHA, China (AP) – Officials were given emergency powers Wednesday to combat floodwaters in central China’s Hunan province, where tens of thousands of workers were trying to hold back the rising waters of a lake that threaten to swamp a city and farming villages. Across China and South Asia, floods and landslides this summer have left about 2,000 dead and displaced millions.

In eastern Nepal on Wednesday, a landslide triggered by heavy monsoon rains swept through a mountain village, leaving at least 65 people feared dead, an official said. Helicopter flights to bring in relief material and rescuers from Nepal’s capital Katmandu had to be postponed until Thursday because of bad weather.

In China, officials were given special powers to commandeer labor, land and materials under the emergency order declared for Hunan, a densely populated farming area where more than 100 people have died in flooding and landslides.

Some 400 soldiers have joined 850,000 civilians battling to hold off flooding in rivers and Dongting Lake, where water has risen to danger levels along hundreds of miles of dikes, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. Rains stopped Tuesday night and several days of dry weather were predicted.

The lake is bordered by Yueyang, a city of 600,000 people, and scores of farming villages, where hundreds of thousands more live. Many lie below the lake’s level during China’s summer rainy season and rely on dikes to hold back the water.

In Changsha, the provincial capital about 93 miles south of Yueyang, residents were preparing flood defenses to hold off the raging Xiangjiang River. The river, which flows into Dongting Lake, was running at its highest-ever recorded level, according to local newspaper reports.

“Into battle to save Changsha!” the Changsha Evening News urged in a headline above pictures of houses in nearby towns covered in water up to their eaves.

The Zhishui, another river that flows into the lake, was also threatening to flood its banks, Xinhua said.

However, the Yangtze, China’s mightiest river, which joins the lake at Yueyang, was opened again to navigation on Wednesday as a flood crest passed downriver, Xinhua said. The boat lock and water diversion channel at the construction site of the massive Three Gorges Dam had been closed over the weekend because of high waters, forcing passengers to traverse the section by bus.

Nationwide in China, nearly 1,000 people have been reported killed this rainy season.

Some 21 people died in a landslide and 6,000 are homeless in Hunan’s Chenzhou County, said France Hurtubise, the Beijing-based regional spokeswoman for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

She said key tobacco crops were destroyed and washed-out roads blocked rescuers from reaching seven or eight badly damaged mountain villages.

“People would point out to me where their houses had been, and there was nothing there,” she said. In neighboring Leiyang county, “I was grabbed by a 76-year-old woman who was sobbing and said she had lost everything.”

In Yunnan province in China’s southwest, 40 bodies have been recovered and 23 people are still missing from an Aug. 14 mudslide triggered by heavy rains in Yuxi county, a local official said. Xinhua said last week that more than 600 houses in Yuxi were destroyed by the flow of mud and rock.

In South Asia, around 1,000 people have died in flooding since the heavy monsoon downpours began. Worst hit has been the Himalayan nation of Nepal, where nearly 500 people have been killed and 250,000 left homeless by landslides and floods.

Most deaths have occurred in remote mountainous areas accessible only by helicopter. Other areas have been cut off as torrential rains have washed away roads.

Most of the residents of the remote village of Thapra were asleep when the landslide struck early Wednesday, said Lekhnath Pokhrel of the Natural Calamity Management Center.

“Initial reports said that 40 houses were swept away and at least 65 people are reported to be missing and feared killed,” Pokhrel said.

The village, about 125 miles east of the capital, Katmandu, is in an isolated mountainous area with no roads to nearby towns. People use mountain trails to reach it.

Across the border, more than 10,000 people were shifted to relief camps as a dam in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh burst on Tuesday, releasing waters pent up from rains the past days, the area’s administrator Rajesh Rajaura said.

At least 10 people were swept away by the torrent, Press Trust of India news agency reported.

In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, at least 27 people have died this week from drownings, house collapses and snakebites, said A.C. Pandey, a top state relief and rehabilitation official. Snakebites are common during monsoon floods, as poisonous vipers are carried through the waters. Another 39 people have died in India’s northeastern state of Assam.

In Bangladesh, the swollen Jamuna River broke through its embankments and swamped a dozen villages on Tuesday, causing no immediate casualties but cutting thousands of people off from help.

The annual rains have killed 158 people and submerged nearly one-third of the delta nation in the worst flooding in four years. Nearly 7 million people have been stranded or forced to leave their homes.