BEIJING Nearly a half-million people fled a flood zone surrounding central China's swollen Huai River, while high waters in the south unleashed a plague of an estimated 2 billion field mice that were ravaging crops, state press reported yesterday.
Continuous rain since June has raised the river to dangerous levels. The official Xinhua news agency said the region was bracing for its worst floods in decades.
Xinhua said that 488,800 people had been evacuated from the central provinces of Anhui, Henan and Jiangsu and that several cities and railway lines were in danger of being inundated.
The Huai had been diverted into other rivers and low-lying fields to slow its rise, Xinhua said.
Thirteen sluices at the Wangjiaba hydropower station on the Huai were shut after being left open for 45 hours to relieve pressure. They were ordered closed when the water level dropped down to a danger level cutoff of 96 feet.
The Huai flows through densely populated farmland between China's two major rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze. Bottlenecks and elevation changes make flooding a regular occurrence during the summer rainy season.
Xinhua said nationwide flooding and rainfall-triggered landslides have killed at least 360 persons so far this summer, mainly in the southwestern province of Sichuan, and have caused billions of dollars in damage.
The State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters put the direct economic losses at $3.13 billion, the agency reported.
