CHINA: Hundreds of thousands of Chinese are working against the clock to shore up defences around a dangerously swelling giant lake threatening to flood hundreds of villages and towns, local officials said.
Many toiled through the night, piling sandbags and checking for breaches in hundreds of miles of embankments and dykes protecting 10 million people living in a region of flat, fertile farmland in the southern province of Hunan.
The crisis point is expected on Sunday, when a flood crest surging down the Yangtze River sweeps into Dongting Lake, a body of water the size of Luxembourg which is already more than 2.5 metres (8 ft) above its flood warning level. The provincial government is preparing for the worst, clearing roads so that relief goods, like tents, for those driven from their homes, can get through.
Two cities, Changsha and Wuhan, with a combined population of 13 million, are also at risk.
Already, some 3,000 people in Changsha, the Hunan capital which stands on the banks of one of four swollen rivers feeding into Dongting, have been forced from their homes on an island as it virtually disappeared under water.
"Some people have been clearing out, others are going back to collect their stuff," said fisherman Mr Duan Xuicheng. "I've been taking them back and forth from morning until night."
Those still there were either up to their waists in water or taking refuge on the second floor of their homes.
China's summer floods have already killed more than 900 people despite government efforts to cure the annual scourge after 4,000 died in 1998 in the worst flooding in decades. Beijing banned logging - which had stripped the upper reaches of China's major rivers bare - and embarked on a huge reforestation campaign.
The controversial Three Gorges Dam is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but that will not be finished until around 2010. The dire threat posed by Dongting Lake and the Yangtze to life and the region's economy is no less this year, however.
"There are 900,000 people fighting the floods. There are people everywhere," said a flood control official in Changsha, about 100 km (60 miles) from Dongting. "They have surrounded the lake."
Soldiers have been drafted in to help fill and stack sandbags around Dongting, China's second-biggest freshwater lake and a major overspill for the Yangtze,.
The economic impact is evident in China's top rice-growing province, with a million tonnes already lopped off this year's production estimates.