China peasants brace for lake flood peak, mood calm
Date: 26-Aug-02
Country: CHINA
Author: Jonathan Ansfield
An estimated 10 million people in the surrounding area would be at risk if the lake and river defences were breached but many people on the ground voiced optimism that the worst could be averted.
The river surge is due to reach Dongting on Sunday, and officials said they had considered releasing water from the brimming lake into the surrounding flat farmland from which tens of thousands of people have been evacuated.
"The situation here is not that serious. We hope the waters will recede," said Chen, a 60-year-old civilian on flood watch at one of many tents dotted along the banks of the lake.
"But I have to stay here until the waters go down four metres," he said.
Officials say they expect the water level at Dongting - a lake the size of Luxembourg - to hit a peak of 35 metres (115 ft) on Sunday.
That peak would still be some 90 cm (35 inches) below the record hit in 1998, when the lake burst its banks and killed more than 100 people. In all, 4,000 people died in floods across China in that disastrous summer.
Witnesses said a minor flood had already virtually submerged at least one small village 10 km (six miles) south of Yueyang city, near the lake's northeast shore, but that locals appeared calm.
While tens of thousands have been evacuated from the area, many in cities like Yueyang are staying, hoping water levels will drop before there is a catastrophe.
A peasant army of around 10,000 farmers in reed hats, and wielding picks and hoes, was patrolling the vast lake's embankments just south of Yueyang, bolstering dykes with sandbags.
TURNING THE CORNER?
Flood control officials have been relatively hopeful of staving off a disaster, saying a 10 billion yuan ($1.21 billion) programme to build up dykes and plant trees around the lake since 1998 had made the region less susceptible to flooding.
If there was no heavy rain in the next few days, they said, Dongting's water level should start receding at the start of next week. Weather forecasters predict light showers for Monday and Tuesday.
Across China, where the summer rains began early this year, more than 900 people have already died in floods and landslides.
The China Daily quoted Hunan's Ministry of Civil Affairs as saying 27,000 houses had collapsed and 415,000 ha (one million acres) of crops had been damaged in Hunan, China's top rice-growing province. It did not specify where.
The controversial Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world, is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but that will not be finished until 2009.
CITIES AT RISK
Dongting, which covers 1,000 sq miles (2,700 sq km), has been rising an average half a metre (1.6 ft) a day this week. At 0900 GMT last week it stood at 2.82 metres (9 ft 3 in) above its flood warning level, the flood control office said.
Apart from the surrounding countryside two major cities, Changsha and Wuhan with a combined population of 13 million, could also be at risk if the big spill did happen. Officials said the provincial government and the Chinese Red Cross had stocks of tents, food and quilts on hand in case it did.
Already, some 3,000 people in Changsha, the provincial capital which stands on the banks of one of the rivers feeding into Dongting, have been forced from their homes on an island as it virtually disappeared under water.
The economic impact of more than a week of torrential rain in Hunan is already evident. Analysts have already cut estimates of China's total rice crop this year.