630,000 People Evacuated from Flooded Area

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, July 12, 2003

630,000 People Evacuated from Flooded Area

The Chinese government has dispatched 16,542 troops in 60 groups to evacuate 630,000 people threatened by floodwaters, and to repair and reinforce embankments in the swollen Huaihe River Valley in the past two weeks.

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Rising floodwaters have forced the evacuation of 630,000 people from the swollen Huaihe River Valley area in East China. More than 16,000 soldiers helped with the move, local flood control sources said on Friday.

Sources with the Nanjing Military Command said on Friday they had dispatched 16,042 troops with 1,017 motor vehicles and 104 boats in flood-related operations by July 11 in Anhui Province, east China.

The evacuation came after more than 20 sections of dykes were breached, affecting 1.1 million of the 1.6 million residents in the valley, and the water showed no signs of abating.

They had reinforced 1,133 km of embankments and shipped 140,000tons of materials on the middle and lower reaches of the river and its tributaries.

The Jinan Military Command on Friday also dispatched 500 soldiers to the upper reaches of the Huaihe River to guard a threatened section of the Shiguan River, a tributary of the Huaihe,in Henan Province.

To prevent the swollen Huaihe River from overflowing and being breached, water has been diverted into nine flood water diversion areas in the past week to protect major cities and the key national railway line running through the province.

According to an official report by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, some 569 people have been killed during this year's floods and direct economic losses of 39.87 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) have been caused.

As of July 10, over 9.5 million hectares of farmland had been affected, and some 1.5 million hectares had suffered total crop failure. The normal lives and employment of nearly 140 million people have been affected, with 51,000 people struck ill or injured and around 2.3 million people forced from their homes.

The ministry did not give losses from previous years, but according to reports, in 1998, more than 2,000 died in seasonal flooding.

As the rainfall along the Huaihe River Valley still continues, the flood situation in Hubei and Hunan provinces along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River is deteriorating fast, posing a great challenge to the country's emergency rescue capabilities, said the report.

Currently, the ministry has provided 35,000 tents and co-operated with the Ministry of Finance to allocate a total of 110.9 million yuan (US$13.36 million) in relief funds to the 11 flood-hit regions.

In another development, rescue teams had recovered six bodies as of Friday at the site where 19 road workers were buried on Wednesday by mud-rock flows in the Tibet Autonomous Region in Southwest China.

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China Dispatches Military Personnel for Flood Control

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