BEIJING, Aug 25: The level of Dongting Lake, China’s second largest, was lowering early on Sunday morning after reaching its crest a day earlier, providing some relief to workers mobilized to fight the effects of flooding in central China, Chinese officials said.

The lake has been levelling off and its dykes have been holding up despite being heavily saturated, said Zhou Beida, a flood official in the Hunan province’s capital city, Changsha.

The pressure on the dykes, however, was posing a danger, Zhou Beida said.

More than 700,000 people threatened by floods were evacuated to safety in central China, according to official reports, and 8.2 million people are at risk around the lake.

Hunan and other central Chinese provinces, Hubei, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Anhui as well as the southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, were affected by flooding. Small leaks in dykes were causing minor flooding in the cities of Yiyang, Changde and Yueyang. Repairs were being done on the dykes, Zhou Beida said.

Preparedness is said to be better this year than in 1998 when floods took the lives of more than 4,000 people.

Since that time more than a billion dollars has been put into flood control readiness and strengthening dykes, official reports said.

Despite this, more than a 1,000 persons have died this year from floods and landslides.

So far 970,000 workers, 15,000 soldiers and 100,000 local militia have gathered to fight flooding around Lake Dongting alone, and another 10,000 soldiers are on hand for rescue operations, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

emergency at wuhan: The flood peak along China’s swollen Yangtze River passed the Dongting region but was now rolling towards Wuhan city, some 180 kilometres downstream.

Officials there declared a state of emergency as the city’s 7.5 million residents braced for rising waters, state press reported.

“At 11:00 pm yesterday the water level was 34.75 meters, but by 08:30 this morning water levels had fallen by two centimetres to 34.73 meters,” Zhang Huaiqiu, at the lake’s Lianhuatang monitoring station, told AFP.

The situation at neighbouring Qilishan monitoring station near Chenglingji township was similar with waters receding by three centimetres overnight, station official Chen Shouyong said.

“In 1998, it was really dangerous, but now we still have one meter to go before we reach the levels of four years ago,” Chen told AFP

Both stations are on the northeastern side of the lake at the confluence with the Yangtze River some 10 kilometres from Yueyang city, an area historically prone to flooding.

Despite receding slightly, water levels on Dongting Lake remained nearly three meters over warning levels on Sunday.

Locals expressed fears that the area’s 10 million residents were not yet out of danger as workers feverishly reinforced dikes and police closed off roads around the lake.

“The water really hasn’t receded that much, it seems that the danger is not over yet, otherwise why would they close down the roads.” Cang Li, a taxi driver near Yueyang told AFP Sunday.

Roads around the lake in the Yueyang area were open on Saturday, but Cang expressed fears that receding waters could also lead to the dikes crumbling into the lake.

“I’m still not certain the danger is over,” said Ling Guoping, a worker in a paper mill in Chenglingji.

“In 1998, the part of our paper mill closest to the lake was flooded which left part of our plant out of work.”

More than a million people, including soldiers and farmers, have been preparing to battle a flood crest on the lake, where rising waters have threatened to engulf millions of people living in the area, the Xinhua news agency reported.

But officials have expressed confidence that the area would be spared a repeat of the 1998 disaster when the region battled some of the worse flooding in recent history. — dpa/AFP