132 dead, 86 missing in S China floods
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As of Sunday morning, more than 10 million people in south China's nine provinces have been affected by severe floods, the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters (SFCDRH) said Sunday.
Mud flows and floods triggered by the intense rainstorms that started mid-June have left 132 people dead and 86 missing and prompted the evacuation of 280,000 people in nine provinces, including Fujian, Jiangxi, and Hunan provinces.
The havoc has brought total economic losses in the nine provinces to 14.5 billion yuan (2.1 billion U.S. dollars) and affected 535,500 hectares of crops and led to the collapse of 68,000 houses.
The office urged local governments to boost anti-flood measures to keep losses to a minimum.
The office and the nation's Ministry of Water Resources dispatched three teams of experts to the provinces of Guizhou, Zhejiang and the municipality of Chongqing Sunday to aid local authorities to fight the floods, said Zhang Zhitong, vice director of the office.
"I've never seen such a big flood in my life," said a 50-year-old resident Yu Ningshan in Taining County in Sanming City of east China's Fujian Province.
"The previous floods only rose over the bridge while this one flooded the streets and the whole county looks like a sea," Yu said.
The rainstorm is being described as a 'once in a century' event as some 225 millimeters of rainfall was recorded in six hours, according to an official of the Fujian Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
In Eryou Village of Hunan province, the precipitation reached 180 millimeters Saturday morning as the rain triggered 73 landslides and damaged 8600 meters of roads.
"The rain was too heavy. The rain, the river and the streams merged together. The water rose dozens of meters in a few hours," said a resident named Xie Genhong.
"Many streams changed the direction their water flowed. There was water on and down the seven-meter-high bridge in our village," Xie said.
Government officials and local residents had been battling the storms. As of 5:00 p.m. Sunday, 6,331 policemen and firefighters and 1,209 vehicles had been sent to the affected provinces, said the spokesman of the Ministry of Public Security.
Also, officials had rescued at least 4,385 stranded residents and more than 426 million yuan (about 63 million U.S. dollars) of property, the spokesman said.The ministry has allocated 450,000 yuan of police supplies to the affected areas in Jiangxi Province to assist in relief work, the spokesman said.
