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Floods, landslides kill over 40 in south China
China has evacuated 100,000 residents of a southern city to escape a swollen river in one of three provinces where heavy rains have triggered landslides and floods killing more than 44 people.
Floodwaters forced the mass evacuation overnight of residents in low-lying areas of the industrial city of Wuzhou, where the Xijiang river had reached 25.74 meters by Tuesday night, more than eight meters higher than the warning level, state media said. Notices on the mass evacuation were posted on walls, warning sirens blared in the dark of night and Wuzhou residents began to load up cars, trucks and carts with valuables and flee the area for higher ground. "In the face of these floods, the attitude of the government is to make sure that no one is killed," Ren Kuikang, chief of the Wuzhou flood control and drought relief office, told state television. With much of southern China now under threat, Premier Wen Jiabao urged local governments to step up the fight against the flooding, which kills hundreds in China each summer and causes millions of yuan in damage to homes and crops. Earlier this month, a flash flood swept through a low-lying primary school in northeastern Heilongjiang province, killing 117 people, 105 of them children. Flooding in Guangxi had killed 24 people and left 23 missing, Xinhua news agency said, citing provincial flood control officials. More than 330,000 people had been evacuated to higher ground in the region, where the flooding has caused 1.67 billion yuan ($201 million) in economic losses, damaged 328,000 hectares of crops and toppled more than 20,000 houses, it said. Flooding damaged another 50,000 houses regionwide. RAIL LINK CUT Authorities had expected the Xijiang, which has risen at a rate of 10 cm per hour, to peak on Wednesday night at a hydrographic station in Wuzhou. Heavy rains have killed nine people since Saturday in Guangdong, where a landslide disrupted traffic on a rail line linking the mainland with Hong Kong, Xinhua said. Rainstorms in eastern Guangdong caused cave-ins on part of the Beijing-Kowloon railway line, forcing dozens of trains to either delay or turn back while repairs were made, it said. It has been raining heavily for weeks in Hong Kong, which is in the middle of its summer typhoon season -- when storms roar in from the South China Sea and cause huge flooding and other damage across south China. Water levels on two other rivers in Guangxi -- the Qianjiang and Xunjiang -- were above warning levels and the province had suffered nearly $45 million in economic losses as of Monday due to the recent deluges, Xinhua said, citing local flood control headquarters. In the southeastern province of Fujian, floods and landslides had killed 12 and left five missing, it said. In Shunchang county alone in northern Fujian, dozens of landslides had buried nine people, killing five. Three were missing. While the south is suffering a deluge, much of northern China is sweating
through a heat wave, which has driven temperatures to nearly 40 C (104 F) in the
capital Beijing and convinced the southwestern city of Chongqing to open air
raid shelters to provide shady relief.
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