Floods threaten major cities, oil field in northeast China

Soldiers and civilians scramble to build a third dike to protect Daqing, a city that produces about half of China's oil
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Map of flooded regions

BEIJING (CNN) -- Soldiers worked around the clock Tuesday, piling sandbags along a 16-mile embankment in a desperate effort to protect the northeast Chinese city of Harbin against what could be its worst flood in 50 years.

Flooding along the Songhua River near Harbin already has destroyed more than 6,000 rural houses and forced the evacuation of 28,000 people, the state-run Xinhua News agency reported.

More than 300,000 soldiers and civilians were patrolling levees along the Songhua, plugging leaks and buttressing embankments against major flooding expected to hit the city on Wednesday, Xinhua said.

Elsewhere in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, soldiers scrambled to build a makeshift earth dike between the swollen Songhua and a highway linking Harbin, a city of 9 million people, and Daqing, home to China's largest oil field.

On Monday, the flooded Nen River punched a 50-yard-wide hole in an embankment protecting Daqing. Soldiers worked to repair it and build up another dike that would be the final defense of the oil field and the 2.3 million people who live in Daqing.

The Songhua River has reached record levels in Harbin

Floods had closed 1,809 wells in Daqing, cutting daily production by 3,724 tons (27,930 barrels), the China Oil News said on Tuesday.

Previous reports had estimated that 1,217 of Daqing's 25,000 wells had been forced to close.

"Some of the wells at the border were inundated," said an official with the Daqing Oilfield Anti-Flood Office. "But the water will not reach the main oil producing areas today. Workers and soldiers are trying to block up the third dike."

A Daqing official said the oilfield produced 56 million tons of crude in 1997, accounting for a little more than a third of China's total output of 162 million tons.

To the south, there was temporary relief for hundreds of thousands of evacuees along the Yangtze River. Officials decided not to blow up a key dike in Jingzhou to deliberately flood an area south of Shashi and safeguard cities down river.

Xinhua said 335,000 people had been moved out the area that would be inundated, in Hubei's Jingjiang flood diversion area, in case officials go ahead with the plan.

Any respite from the flooding, however, is only temporary at best.

More rain was expected Tuesday on the Songhua and Nen rivers in the northeast and on the lower and middle reaches of the Yangtze, the Workers Daily reported.