Rivers surpass warning levels

Flooding causes water to rise above danger points in Yangtze, other waterways as rain continues to pour

Floods pushing rivers above their warning levels have raged through vast stretches of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin amid continuous torrential rains that are expected to linger until Friday, according to authorities.

By 12 pm on Tuesday, water in all parts of the Yangtze's mainstream that are downstream of Jianli county, Hubei province, had risen above their warning levels. At the most extreme, the water level is 1.28 meters above its danger point, according to the Ministry of Water Resources.

In Taihu Lake, a water body along the Yangtze's mainstream in its lower reaches, 58 monitoring stations reported above-warning level floods. To make matters worse, 30 stations saw water swell above the maximum design levels for their dikes.

Meanwhile, water levels in 42 rivers, mostly in Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, also reached their warning points. Among them, five rivers saw water increase beyond the designed carrying capability of their dikes, the ministry said.

It said downpours are expected to continue. From Tuesday to Friday, some areas in Guizhou, Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces are forecast to receive 120 to 160 millimeters of rain. In the most extreme circumstance, precipitation levels could reach 200 to 300 mm.

On Wednesday, the National Meteorological Center renewed an orange alert it issued a day earlier for rainstorms in Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan and Guizhou provinces.

It said rainfall will be extraordinarily heavy in northern parts of Jiangxi, with precipitation of 250 to 300 mm.

Some of the affected areas will be battered by brief but strong rainfall with hourly precipitation of up to 80 mm, it added.

Because of the upcoming rainfall, the water level in the mainstream of the Yangtze and the four major lakes along its middle and lower reaches－Dongting, Taihu, Poyang and Chaohu－will continue to rise.

"The pressure on flood control will be increasingly higher. The situation is grim," the Ministry of Emergency Management said in a media release.

While upgrading the emergency response from level IV to III on Tuesday, the ministry dispatched teams to guide local flood control in 11 provincial regions expected to be affected by the downpours, including Sichuan and Hunan provinces.

The incessant rainfall has forced the Xin'anjiang Reservoir, the biggest in Zhejiang, to unprecedentedly lift all its nine sluice gates on Wednesday as water in the 61-yearold project reached 108.38 meters at 8 am on the day, 1.88 meters higher than the maximum water level authorities set for it during the flood season, according to the Zhejiang water resources authority.

The discharge forced the evacuation of over 30,000 residents, according to local authorities.

Since the Xin'anjiang River Basin entered its Plum Rains season－a long period of continuous rainy or cloudy weather that usually occurs during June and July as plums ripen－late in May, the overall precipitation the basin received has reached 986 mm, which is 2.64 times more than the yearly average, Chen Tao, chief forecaster with the National Meteorological Center, told a news conference on Wednesday.

He also said the basin is expected to receive another 100 to 150 mm of precipitation over the next three days.

"Precautionary measures are especially needed for floods in small and medium rivers, mountain torrents and geological disasters," he said.