Dazed China flood victims stranded on furniture

WUZHOU, China - Dazed Chinese were navigating flooded city and village streets on upturned beds and picking through the rubble of their shattered homes yesterday as the nationwide flood season death toll rose to 536.

Torrential rain in southern China has bloated rivers above their bursting points and triggered mudslides, killing at least 97 people in the last week alone and leaving 41 missing, state media said.

With some rivers still rising, things may only get worse, though waters have peaked in some areas.

In the hard-hit industrial city of Wuzhou, in the southern Guangxi region, houses on the banks of the Xijiang river were flooded up to their roofs and downtown residents had been forced to move to upper-storey apartments or to flee to higher ground where many were living under any cover they could find.

Instead of cars, traffic was composed of upturned beds, cupboards and doors turned into makeshift rafts, with people paddling between dangling, bare electricity wires seeking food and other necessities.

One Wuzhou resident said flood alarms had stopped ringing and water levels were dropping. The government has sent in People's Liberation Army troops to man sandbags and try to keep the waters at bay.

But the situation in surrounding rural areas, many yet to be reached, appeared grim.

"The government only rescued urban residents. They don't care about people in the countryside," an elderly villager named Hu Jinhuan told Reuters.

"Some old villagers couldn't bear to leave their homes, and because there were no rescuers here, they died in their houses."

In another devastated Guangxi village, Hu Haiyin sorted through mud-covered timbers, computer parts and other remnants of his simple, former home. Many mud houses like Hu's were flattened.

Hu's 43-year-old son died in the flooding on Tuesday.

"We had no warning at all. We are hoping that international aid groups will help us, but they should just give us any aid directly, they shouldn't give it to the government," he said.

Many people, like 89-year-old Xu Yin, who watched flood waters sweep away his house and all his belongings, are living under tents outside villages rescue workers have yet to reach.

In eastern Fujian province, 18 people were missing after a bus and a pickup truck were washed off a highway on Thursday, state media said.

"Summer floods usually last just one day, but this week the floods came and went and came back five times. Now the waters are finally starting to recede," a flood prevention official from the Fujian city of Nanping said by telephone.

Some 1.4 million people had been evacuated in six southern provinces, where the week's floods had caused over 11 billion yuan ($NZ1.9 billion) in direct economic losses and inundated huge tracks of crop land, Xinhua news agency said.

Mild flooding hit Hong Kong's northern New Territories and Macau was on high flood alert with the southern Pearl River expected to peak around noon on Friday, it said.

Flood damage across China for the year so far had reached nearly 20.5 billion yuan, Xinhua said.

China is struck by floods and simultaneous drought every summer, causing enormous loss of life. Deforestation compounds the problem, as torrential rains trigger rock slides and mud flows off bare mountainsides.

Treeless hills were blamed in part for a flash flood that devastated a primary school in northeastern Heilongjiang province earlier this month which killed 117 people - 105 of them children.

- REUTERS