253,500 evacuated due to China floods
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Some 253,500 residents had been safely evacuated in northeast China's Liaoning Province after torrential rains caused waters to rise to the highest level in more than a decade along a major river bordering China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), local officials said Sunday.
The hundreds of thousands of residents were relocated in less than 24 hours from late Saturday to Sunday, provincial flood control authorities said.
However, no new casualties were reported on Sunday. Previously, authorities said four people were killed and one remained missing due to floods in the city of Dandong, facing Sin'uiju City of the DPRK.
Heavy rainfalls that began Thursday have swelled the Yalu River, which marks the border of China and the DPRK. On Saturday night, the water level at one monitoring station in Dandong rose to 2.35 meters above the warning line, the highest in a decade and the second highest since records began being kept in 1934.
Water levels began to dip late Sunday as rains stopped, though provincial authorities warned that the danger has not yet passed.
Workers are racing to build sand bag flood barriers along part of the river where the water has overflowed.
Over 2,000 soldiers and crews have been mobilized to rescue stranded residents. About 70 vehicles, 38 speed boats and six helicopters were used in the rescue operations, local officials said.
The flooding caused 361 houses to collapse and cut transportation, communications and power supplies in some areas. The length of the dike breaches has reached 149.6 kilometers.
Torrential rains started to pound Liaoning Province Thursday at midnight with precipitation of as much as 651 mm in the worst-hit region.
In most parts of the Yalu River basin the precipitation ranged from 200 mm to 400 mm, said Wang Dianwu, director of Dandong's hydrographic bureau.
Besides the enormous rainfall, a reservoir under repair in the upper reaches of the Yalu River also intensified the flood relief pressure in the lower reaches, as the reservoir could not function, he said.
China has been suffering from a string of rain-triggered disasters recently as the country battles its worst floods in more than a decade.
In the southwestern province of Yunnan, 29 people were killed and 63 remained missing as of Sunday, four days after mudslides hit a remote mountain town and buried villages there.
Rain-triggered mudslides also killed more than 18 people in Wenchuan and Qingchuan counties in southwest China's Sichuan - which was devastated by a massive earthquake in 2008.
In the northwestern province of Gansu, at least 1,435 people were killed and another 330 are reported missing after mudslides hit Zhouqu County nearly two weeks ago.
Authorities on Sunday banned the retrieval of bodies from the worst-hit areas, citing slim chances of the discovery of more bodies and the mounting threat of disease outbreaks.
Only one body was retrieved on Sunday.
"After rounds of search, there is no trace of life at all in the mud-covered areas. As the bodies of the victims were highly decomposed, if the retrieval continues, it would be more likely to trigger disease outbreaks," a government directive says.
The directive says the ban was issued after consulting experts, village officials and families of the victims.
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