BEIJING, July 12: Evacuation efforts were underway on Saturday as hundreds of thousands of people sought to escape rising waters on China’s central Huai River, which is threatening to overflow its banks amid torrential rains, officials and press reports said.

Flood prevention work along the Huai River has reached a critical point, local officials said. The government reported Friday there had been 569 deaths due to flooding in China so far this year and some 2.29 million people had been evacuated from disaster areas around the country.

Rains that have brought flooding in central, eastern and southern China since mid-May have already destroyed more than 505,000 homes and damaged another 1.33 million. Economic losses nationwide are estimated at some 39.87 billion yuan (4.8 billion dollars), the Ministry of Civil Affairs report said.

Meanwhile, more than 40 people, including several tourists, were missing Saturday morning after a huge mud-rock flow in Danba county in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Heavy rains have drenched the region at the headwaters of the Yangtze River since mid-June, Xinhua news agency said.

Some 90 people and two motor vehicles remained stranded in the mud flow in a mountainous region just east of the Tibetan Plateau, it said.

With water levels above warning marks along the central Huai River, China’s third longest, the government is struggling to prevent further disaster along the river which flows through central Henan and Anhui provinces and eastern Jiangsu province.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who departed Beijing on Saturday to visit the Huai River area, was seen on television inspecting and directing flood prevention work and evacuation measures.

Vice Premier Hui Liangyu, who is in charge of the country’s overall flood prevention work, briefed Wen on the flooding along the Huai River with other experts on the prime minister’s plane, the report said.

Wen, in a short-sleeved shirt under partly sunny skies, also visited evacuees in tent cities along the river and watched the swollen brown river surging downstream.

“Water levels at the Zhengyangguan hydrologic station reached a historic level of 26.62 meters early this morning and are still rising,” an official named Chen at the Anhui province anti-flood office told AFP.

At the Wangjiaba station further up the river the water level was also at a record high, surpassing 28.79 meters Saturday morning, he said.

Both stations were in the upper reaches of the river, which is home to more than 100 million people and is one of the country’s most important grain production areas.

At least 780,000 people had been evacuated from low lands along the river in central Anhui province alone, Chen said, as the government mobilized thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of local citizens to help in evacuation and flood prevention efforts.

So far 20 sections of dykes along the Huai river have been breached and nine water diversion areas along the river’s course inundated in an effort to reduce the water level on the swelling river, Xinhua said.

In the lower reaches, where the river flows into Hongze Lake in neighbouring Jiangsu province, workers were feverishly building up dykes as waters continued to rise, said an official named Ji at the Jiangsu anti-flood bureau.

“We have over 2.5 million people involved in fighting floods in the province, including 420,000 people working along dykes,” Ji told AFP.

Jiangsu is crossed by two of China’s biggest rivers, with the Huai River passing through the province’s north and the Yangtze flowing through the south.

The central meteorological bureau predicted torrential rains would continue in the area until at least on Monday.—AFP