CHINA: The waters of a swollen lake in southern China began receding yesterday after a flood crest down the Yangtze River passed without gouging major breaches in dykes protecting millions of homes.
Flood control officials said the surge of water had passed through Dongting Lake early yesterday and was heading for Wuhan, a city of seven million people and capital of Hubei province.
Wuhan officials said they expected some flooding as the river peaked in the early hours of Monday morning, but despite forecasts for more rain they foresaw no disaster.
Water levels there would remain below the danger point, they said.
"The flooding in Wuhan is expected to be small compared to the floods of 1998," a city official said. That year, 4,000 people were killed in the country's worst flooding in decades.
Around Dongting Lake, a body of water the size of Luxembourg, teams of civilians and soldiers checked for leaks along the hundreds of kilometres of dykes containing the lake and the four rivers feeding it.
Some 1,500 civilians and 400 soldiers rushed to a section of dyke that sprang nine leaks to plug them with sandbags and gravel, but the situation appeared under control, officials said.
"There have been no serious floods," said one.
In another area, a big squad of soldiers added a two foot layer of dirt to the top of a dyke.
"We're just worried that the waters could rise from the rain over the next couple of days and might flood over the dyke," their officer told Reuters.
"The chances that that will happen are small, but preparedness is a protection against danger."
For lakeside villagers, fears receded with the water levels.
"I was scared to death when the water rose," Liu Susen, who lives right next to the lake, told Reuters Television.
"In 1995 and 1996, the water totally flooded over the dyke and destroyed our house. This time it came right to the edge and then stopped there and went back down," she said.
And along the Zijiang River, which feeds into Dongting, fishermen returned to the banks again.
"I dared not come during the high waters because the water was so dangerous," said a man surnamed Zhang, who lives near the lake.
"Now I can come back and fish without any worries."
Weathermen forecast heavy rain yesterday and Monday in the upper reaches of the Yangtze as well as the region around Dongting, in Hunan Province, and in Wuhan through Tuesday.
But officials said the rain would be lighter than that which pounded southern China earlier this month. The only likely impact was that the waters would recede more slowly, they said.
Officials in the Poyang region, where the lake was already more than three feet six inches above danger level, said they did not expect major flooding even in the event of more heavy rain.
Still, an army of 1.1 million civilians and soldiers was fanned out along stretches of the flood-prone Yangtze to check for leaks in dykes and plug them, Xinhua news agency said.
Officials in the region had been reasonably confident of a victorious end to their battle to stop Dongting Lake spilling over into flat, fertile countryside where 10 million people live.
The Wuhan officials said embankments protecting their city had also been reinforced considerably since 1998.
China's summer floods have killed more than 900 people already this year and, although Dongting's waters are receding, the annual danger of the Yangtze is far from over.
The controversial Three Gorges Dam upstream, the world's largest hydroelectric project, is meant to bring the mighty river under control, but it will not be completed until 2009.