Flooding widespread in town where 185,000 forced to flee

ANZAOYUAN, China (AP) -- Zhu Desheng and her neighbors got the warning late one sultry July night: the dike on the Songzi River was leaking.

Thousands of villagers took refuge on still-solid parts of the earthen barrier. Over the next two days, they watched the trickle become a torrent, ripping open the dike and making a lake of this town in the central Chinese province of Hunan. Some 185,000 people fled what local officials call one of the worst disasters during a summer of record flooding in China.

"That's my house there," said Mrs. Zhu, a 48-year-old farmer. She pointed to a rooftop of ceramic tiles poking out of the water 100 yards from the tent where her family of five now lives on the grassy dike.

Anzaoyuan exemplifies the vast scale of the damage from two months of flooding along the Yangtze River and its tributaries, including the Songzi. Water covering the town stretches for miles, punctuated by an occasional rooftop, tree or telephone pole.

Until now, the outside world heard little about such areas. Reports by state media are limited, and foreign reporters have been refused permission to visit. Many who tried were turned back or detained.

In the first officially sanctioned look at the devastation, a group of foreign reporters was allowed into Anzaoyuan this weekend on a 1{-day trip, chaperoned by government officials, to see relief work and dike-repair efforts.

Flooding has killed 569 people in Hunan, as well as destroying 940,000 houses and almost 1 million acres of crops, according to provincial Deputy Governor Pang Daomu. Losses have reached $200 million.

In all of China, over 2,000 have been killed by flooding this summer and millions left homeless.

Still, Pang insisted such damage was limited compared with previous disasters, especially the 1954 flooding on the Yangtze that killed 30,000 people.

"We have reduced the level of casualties to the lowest possible (level)" he told reporters in the provincial capital of Changsha.

The impact of annual summer deluges is worsened by excessive farming and tree-cutting that leaves hillsides unable to trap rainfall. Many areas that flood regularly are settled and heavily farmed, increasing the possibility of deaths and damage.

Pang blamed record rain. In June, he said, one area of Hunan got more than 26 inches of rain in three days, half the area's usual annual precipitation.

The leak in the Anzaoyuan dike began at 10 p.m. on July 24, and eventually grew into a 420-foot-long hole, said Hong Mingxiang, a local official in charge of repairs.

By the time it finally was plugged with bags of stones and sand on Aug. 11, some 26,000 acres of the flat, low-lying land around Anzaoyuan was flooded.

Residents pointed to places where they said they had seen bodies, but Hong said no one in the town had died.

The force of water rushing through the dike ripped the walls off some buildings. A barge carrying sandbags to plug the hole was pulled through and sank, its stern jutting into the air.

Hong said only Jiujiang, a major city in eastern China where a dike on the Yangtze collapsed earlier this month, has suffered more severe flood losses.

When reporters visited Anzaoyuan, about 100 soldiers were adding bags of stones to the dike in what appeared to be a staged event. When the reporters passed by four hours later, the soldiers were nowhere to be seen.

All but 10,000 of the 100,000 people who fled onto the dike have moved in with friends or into government housing, according to local officials.

The remaining row of government-issue blue canvas tents and lean-tos made of bamboo and nylon sheet on the dike still stretches for miles. Pigs, goats and chickens forage for food on its grassy banks.

While there are rumors of disease outbreaks among flood refugees elsewhere, there was no sign of it in Anzaoyuan. Children were bright-eyed and energetic, despite living in spartan conditions.

The family of Mrs. Zhu, the farmer, moved some cooking equipment and furniture to the dike before the water rose. Now they subsist on food aid from the government.

"I'm just waiting for the water to recede. I don't know when that will be," she said.

North of Anzaoyuan, an army of 4,000 laborers was reinforcing another earthen dike. The line of workers, some using tractors or bulldozers but most armed only with shovels, stretched farther than the eye could see, working into the night under electric lights strung up on bamboo poles.

The workers, recruited from nearby villages, were paid with rice, cooking oil and other commodities, said laborer Shen Zhaoling.

In many areas of central China, flooding is aggravated by land-hungry farmers who have cultivated and settled flood plains, increasing the risk of death and damage. But officials indicated they aren't considering barring villagers from returning to areas that routinely are inundated.

"Forty years ago, no one lived there" in Anzaoyuan, conceded Deputy Mayor Liu Benzi of Changde, which governs the town. "But now, we can't tell everyone to leave. We can't destroy everything they've built."