BEIJING, July 8: Eighteen people have died, thousands of villages are besieged and more than a million residents are stranded in the worst floods since 1991 in China’s Huai River valley, officials said Tuesday.
Official figures indicate the three provinces in the valley — Anhui, Jiangsu and Henan — have suffered 13 deaths and economic losses of nearly 7.2 billion yuan (871 million dollars).
Most of the destruction has been in central China’s Anhui province, where eight people have died and 21 million people affected, said Wang Xintao, an official from the provincial civil affairs department.
“It’s the worst flooding since 1991 in terms of the volume of rainfall and water level,” Wang told AFP.
More than 5,700 villages in Anhui are besieged by floodwaters, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Wang said 378,900 people living in the flood valley have been relocated to higher ground, but even highlands were surrounded by water, leaving 1.14 million residents there stranded.
They were not in immediate danger, but many of them were living in tents distributed by disaster relief officials.
“The military will send a boat out to deliver food and daily necessities to them,” Wang said.
More than one million hectares of farmland are ruined, with agricultural damage alone estimated to be 3.4 billion yuan.
Damage also included 32,000 houses that collapsed.
Some 5,371 people were either injured or ill, according to China News Service.
The ministry has allocated 37 million yuan of disaster relief funds to Anhui to tackle the problem.
Local officials told AFP they have not seen any disease outbreaks, but have been distributing water purification tablets and educating the disaster victims on how to prevent the spread of infections.
Flood waters also brought death and destruction to the central province of Henan, further upstream along the flood-prone Huai, one of China’s major rivers.
Two people have died there and five million affected by the swollen waters, an official with Henan’s department of civil affairs said.
CNS said 113,000 people have been relocated, 14,000 houses collapsed, and 612,000 residents of more than 400 villages trapped, CNS said. Local officials could not be immediately reached to learn about the victims’ conditions.
Direct economic loss to the province was estimated at one billion yuan.
No casualties have been reported in Jiangsu, but over 13 million people are affected, 12,000 houses collapsed, and 710,000 hectares of farmland ruined, Xinhua and CNS said.
Local rescue teams have been working to provide food, potable water and accommodation for victims.
Flooding also snarled rail and road traffic in the region as sections of railway lines in Anhui collapsed and flooded, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded, the China Daily said.
China’s flood season usually starts around June and heavy rains are affecting large swathes of the country.
Earlier this month, official media said rains in the south of the country had left at least 148 people dead and affected 45 million. Other parts of China were also affected by heavy rain and flooding.
In Guizhou province in southwest China, five people died and four were injured in several landslides caused by mountain floods this month, the Guizhou Dushibao paper said.
China has spent a total 800 million yuan since the beginning of this year on fighting floods and droughts.—AFP