HONG KONG, Aug 18: Torrential rains and flashfloods have ravaged large tracts of Asia this monsoon season, leaving hundreds dead and millions displaced, with China suffering some of the worst effects.

Chinese state media confirmed on Sunday that almost 250 people have been killed in a fortnight of torrential rains across the country, raising the national flood death toll this year to around 1,000.

This year’s monsoon season has been just as fierce across other parts of Asia with more than 800 people dying and millions being displaced from floods and landslides in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

In South-East Asia, flash floods ripped through mountainous areas of northern Vietnam this week, killing four, submerging hundreds of homes and destroying vital crops.

Thailand was also struck with officials in the northwestern province of Tak reporting on Sunday that two Myanmar nationals were killed there as the Moei river, which divides Thailand and Myanmar, rose to dangerous levels.

The Philippines has also been hit by several typhoons this year, killing dozens.

In China, authorities have struggled to deal with the bad weather that’s plagued the country since June and some government officials have said this summer’s flooding could eventually become almost as bad as in 1998 when about 4,000 people died.

From Yunnan province in the southwest over Hunan in the centre to Zhejiang in the east, more bodies were discovered this weekend as new disasters struck and officials warned of more rain to come.

“The situation is very, very bad,” Red Cross official France Hurtuise told AFP in Beijing by telephone from mountainous Hunan.

“There have been quite a few casualties ... People have died mainly in landslides, and flashfloods have washed away not only mud huts, but entire brick houses,” she said.

At one hospital in rural Hunan, the director lost both his wife and his mother-in-law when the end of the hospital where they were staying was washed away by floods, she said.

In Yunnan, torrential rain and floods have left 106 dead and 72 missing in the mountainous province since the beginning of the month, according to the China Youth Daily.

In Yunnan’s Xinping county, the toll after rain-induced landslides cut a 50-meter chasm in the side of a mountain has risen to 33 dead and 30 missing.

“I have never seen such a terrible natural disaster in my life,” state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a 70-year-old woman as saying.

In Zhejiang province, 21 people were confirmed dead and eight missing after powerful mountain torrents triggered by heavy rain hit dozens of villages, Xinhua said.

Altogether 89,000 people in the province have been affected by the torrents, while 4,210 houses and over 6,400 hectares of farmland had been destroyed, the agency said.

In the northwestern desert region of Xinjiang, which is normally dry and therefore ill-prepared for floods, several counties have been hit by floods after unusually heavy rain, Xinhua said.

The situation had been aggravated by high temperatures that had brought large amounts of melt water from the mountains, Xinhua said.

While no casualties had as yet been reported from Xinjiang, more flooding could occur in the coming days as additional rain was likely, Xinhua reported.

In Germany: As two separate flood crests advanced down Germany’s Elbe valley, the former royal city of Dresden surveyed its damage on Sunday after four days of catastrophic flooding.

Next in line for possible flooding was the city of Magdeburg, at the halfway point in the river’s course. A crest that swept out of a branch river, the Mulde, had reached Schoenebeck, just short of Magdeburg by Sunday morning.

Hard on its heels was the floodwater that invaded Dresden on Thursday and which was passing the Torgau area early Sunday, with the crest nearing Martin Luther’s hometown Wittenberg.

Torgau authorities appealed for volunteers from all over Germany to come and help fill sandbags to strengthen river walls.

Officials say it remains hard to predict where the water will go next, as the river’s flow has been greatly slowed by the congestion, levees have burst and the floodwaters have scoured new channels. More than 150,000 people in the worst-affected towns on the valley had to spend the night in evacuation centres because their homes were flooded or in imminent danger.

At Bitterfeld, a chemicals-producing town in the Mulde valley, relief workers were fighting a military-style battle against the waters, throwing up embankments and readying fallback positions, so fresh defences were in place every time the flood advanced.

None of the water has yet reached the evacuated town of Bitterfeld, population 16,000, nor its industrial estate, which is on slightly higher ground and houses 350 chemicals firms including Europe’s main Aspirin-producing plant.

At Dresden, the water was sinking at a rate of 5 centimetres an hour and pumping had begun to dry out the basements of key museums in old royal palaces and the city’s opera house, the Semper.

But city authorities warned residents not to pump water out of home basements without engineering advice, because sand could be washed out of foundations by the water and houses could collapse.

Further upstream at Grimma near the Czech border, the flood had fully receded leaving streets covered in mud and rubble and homes devastated.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was meeting Sunday in Berlin with the leaders of Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.—AFP/dpa