Canson intensifies flood fears
- Source: Global Times
- [01:23 July 16 2010]
- Comments
A sand boat crashes into a bridge in Poyang, Jiangxi Province Thursday. The collision occurred after a flood earlier damaged a protective barrier on the bridge. Workers are trying to remove the boat. Photo: CFP
By Huang Jingjing
A tropical storm that struck Hainan Province Thursday may compound the situation along the Yangtze River and South China, where floods have been making life miserable for millions of people.
Tropical storm Canson, which was moving at 15 to 20 kilometers per hour with maximum winds of 90 kph, landed on South China's Hainan Province Thursday morning and forced the suspension of trains and boats, people.com.cn reported.
Chen Lei, vice director of the Office of the State Flood Council and Drought Relief Headquarters, was quoted as saying by the Xinhua News Agency Thursday that the storm will exacerbate flooding problems as water levels in the Yangtze River, Poyang Lake, Dongting Lake and Taihu Lake continue to rise.
Floods have killed 594 people in 26 provinces this year and 212 people remain miss-ing. It has caused direct economic losses of 120.2 billion yuan ($17.6 billion), the office statistics showed.
The floods have affected 97.5 million people and 6.16 million hectares of farm-lands, with 590,000 homes flattened, the office said.
The data collected by several monitoring stations in the Yangtze River Thursday all showed that the water level has risen by as much as 0.36 meters over the warning line. In Jiangxi Province alone, 12 dams were reportedly breached.
"The water level kept rising. It's almost approaching the top of the dam," an owner surnamed Shi of an aquaculture farm on the bank of Lake Poyang in a village in Yugan county, Jiangxi Province, told the Global Times Thursday.
She said most of the farmland is already under water.
"I hope the rain stops soon. Otherwise, it might be hard for the dam to stand steady. We don't want to experience the situation of 1998 again, when it flattened nearly all the houses and washed away fishes," she said.
The devastating floods in 1998 created problems in 29 provinces and killed more than 4,000 people.
