China scrambles to contain floods

Around a million people have been mobilised to help protect the dykes stretching 930 kilometres (580 miles), according to official Chinese media.

Tens of thousands of villagers remain on constant vigil around the shores of Lake Dongting, looking for any sign of a leak that could quickly expand into a full collapse.

The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes says the fight to hold back Dongting Lake shown on Chinese television and in the state-controlled media is starting to take on the look of a patriotic struggle.

The waters in the lake, which is twice the size of Hong Kong, are still rising, but much more slowly than before.

Local flood control officials now predict that the water level on the lake will peak on Sunday morning, below the record of 1998 when 4,000 people died.

If the skies remain clear and the dykes hold out, there is real hope that the worst will soon be over, our correspondent says.

Endless vigil

On the east side of the lake, thousands of farmers in reed hats and wielding picks and hoes were patrolling streches of embankment south of the city of Yueyang on Friday, Reuters news agency reported.

Under perfect summer skies, they lined up in some places to pass bags filled with rocks to plug small leaks.

Witnesses said that late on Thursday, water from the lake breached a wall of sandbags, virtually submerging a collection of one-storey houses.

More than 250,000 people are being moved from the most threatened areas around the lake.

The official media said that 27,000 houses had collapsed and 415,000 hectares (one million acres) of crops had been damaged in Hunan, China's top rice-growing province.

The possibility of releasing surplus water from the brimming lake into flat farmland from which tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, is also being considered.

Apart from Dongting, the cities of Changsha and Wuhan - with a combined population of 13 million - are also at risk.

Degraded environment

The devastating floods four years ago prompted Hunan to spend more than $1bn on reinforcing embankments, moving 350,000 farmers and planting trees.

The controversial Three Gorges Dam now under construction upstream is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but that will not be finished until 2009.

According to environmentalists, the repeated floods in the Yangtze region are the result of China's degraded environment.

Across China this summer, more than 900 people have died in floods and landslides.