"I've never seen a flood as devastating as this," Huang says, describing his encounter with the mountain torrents caused by heavy rainfall between June 8 and 10 as an "unexpected sudden blow."

Sources at the Ningshan Flood-Prevention Office say that upon receiving the rainstorm forecast from the local meteorological administration on June 7, the office immediately notified township and village officials asking them to prepare for the floods.

As it turned out, none of them took any special precaution. In some villages, people were not even on duty to answer the phone.

For years, people in the poverty-stricken mountain areas had suffered from drought rather than rainstorms. With an annual average precipitation of 250-400 millimeters, people were been thirsty for rains.

But they did not count on a downpour of more than 400 millimeters within 24 hours.

Few people there even comprehend that the meteorological criterion for "rainstorm" is a rainfall of 100 millimeters.

"I thought the rainfall would relieve us from the drought," says Peng Longjun, a 70-year-old farmer in Simudi Township of Ningshan County.

"It never occurred to me that the rainfall could be so heavy as to flood streets, shatter bridges and inundate houses."

He is still perplexed.

A report from the provincial water resources department of Shaanxi attributes the severe losses to:

Ineffective measures to cope with the emergency

Dereliction of duty by some grassroots officials; and

Shortage of communication facilities.

Environment Abuse

But some experts argue that the more direct causes of the disaster are people's insensitivity to the environment issues and years of abuse of natural resources.

Zhou Yongxin, a local official, says that Ningshan County used to be covered by a large area of primeval forest.

But since the early 1970s, about 100,000 cubic meters of timber is being chopped every year by local farmers - a ready source of cash.

"Although the practice has been outlawed since 1999," Zhou says, "the damage has been done. There has been severe soil erosion."

With the forest cover gone, the soil has become thinner, with the tilth of most farmland being only 20 to 30 centimeters thick.

Torrential rains would bring landslides and mudflows in their wake.

Historical records reveal that between 185 BC and 1949, floods in the southern part of Shaanxi Province occurred about once every 28 years.

But after the 1950s, the interval has shortened to five years.

With a population of more than 36 million, the province of Shaanxi, which has a land area of no more than 190,000 square kilometers, is pressured for space.

Tableland, mountains unsuitable for farming and living account for 81 per cent of the province's area.

In Ankang, one of the worst-hit areas, people built houses along the riverbank and planted their crops nearby.

As a local village head, who did not want to be named, says: "All our hard work over the years has been washed away. It's high time for us to question if we did the right thing to occupy the river way."

Vice-governor Zhang Wei, who is in charge of Shaanxi's flood relief work, says: "Scrambling for land at the cost of vegetation and rivers will not help us out of poverty."

He says the legacy of the flood is not just determination to rebuild their lives but also a raised awareness of ecology.

The people have a vivid illustration on the benefits of preserving the environment: In Foping Panda Natural Reserve of southern Shaanxi, where the forest coverage is around 86 percent, no large-scale landslide or mudflow occurred, and the pandas' normal life was not affected, even though the county witnessed the worst flood it had.

Such a striking contrast taught them a good lesson - they have learned how valuable trees and vegetation are to their life.

Rebuilding Lives

With the arrival of 12,000 kilograms of grain seed and 300 kilograms of vegetable seeds such as cucumber, cabbage, radish and kidney bean, Shaanxi's 5.1 million flood victims scattered in 34 counties have started post-disaster reconstruction.

Agro-technicians and farming experts have also gone there to offer advice on land use and crop planting.

Simultaneously, the province's forestation of wasteland has been accelerated.

The program, which began in 1999, is one of the country's earliest pilot programs to restore the destroyed ecological system.

As most of the trees are still too young to preserve the soil and water well, the local government plans to quicken work on its farmland-for-forest project and relocate farmers in an environment-friendly manner later this year.

(China Daily July 11, 2002)