BEIJING, Aug 20: More than 10 million people were under threat from potentially devastating floods in central China Tuesday, as a vast lake which acts as a buffer for the Yangtze River surged above danger levels, officials and reports said.

With more torrential rain from a looming tropical storm forecast for coming days, tens of thousands of local people were racing to shore up thousands of kilometres of embankments around Dongting Lake, officials said.

There was a possibility the area could be hit by floods as bad as those of 1998, when 4,000 people died, one official warned.

“The lake is above warning marks in a number of places,” said the official, from the Hunan Anti-Flood Bureau headquarters in the provincial capital of Changsha.

Asked whether the situation was better than in 1998 — after which flood defences were massively beefed up — he said that could not be known for certain.

“Everything is changing very quickly, it is very difficult to say things are better,” said the official, who declined to give his name.

Were the 2,800 square-kilometre lake to burst through embankments, the devastation could dwarf that so far in a summer which has already seen around 900 people die in flooding throughout the country.

With swollen rivers emptying into the lake, more than 10 million people and 667,000 hectares of farmland were under threat, the China Daily said.

Authorities around Dongting, China’s second-biggest freshwater lake, “are preparing for possibly the worst flood of the year”, the paper said.

Around 40,000 officials and labourers had been sent to help shore up defences, the Hunan Anti-Flood Bureau official said.

Water levels at the traditional danger spot of Chenglingji, where the Yangtze exits the lake, were well above warning marks Tuesday, an official at the local anti-flood bureau said.

At 3:00 pm the waters were more than a metre and a half above flood warning marks, said the official, who gave her name as Chen.

To add to concerns, meteorologists warned Tuesday that tropical storm Vongfong was due to dump yet more rain over Hunan as it heads across the country.

Vongfong hit the southern province of Guangdong around 8:40 pm Monday and was gradually moving northeast, weakening as it went, the Central Meteorological Bureau said.

It is expected to bring torrential rain to southern Guangdong, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces as well as Hunan.—AFP