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Shipping services suspended on swollen border river

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-08-05 22:45

SHENYANG - Northeast China's Liaoning province Thursday suspended shipping services and tourism on the Yalu River, which marks the border with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), as more rain was forecast to hit the already swollen waterway.

The last two weeks had seen more rain on the river system than at any comparable time in recorded history and more rain was forecast for Thursday and Friday, said a spokesman with the flood control headquarters in the border city of Dandong on the river's lower reaches.

Related readings:  Special coverage: China Combats floods  Death toll from northwest China landslide hits seven  Floods overwhelm streets in NE China  Liaoning transfers residents before the coming rain

Water levels had risen almost half a meter over one night, said a soldier at a border defense station on Thursday.

City authorities also banned fishing on the swollen river.

Shipping services in neighboring Jilin province on the upper reaches were already suspended, said an official with the headquarters, but he did not say when the services were stopped.

More than 40,000 residents had been evacuated from the homes in Dandong by Thursday and authorities had blocked all the gates on dike walls that separate the riverside from the downtown area, said the headquarters.

Some of the evacuated residents were moved to schools on higher ground and others stayed in relatives' homes.

The city has mobilized 43,000 soldiers, civil servants and residents to fight the floods.

The Tumen River, also bordering the DPRK, in neighboring Jilin province, has also seen record water levels in the past two weeks,

The Yanbian Korean autonomous prefecture, which borders the DPRK by the Tumen River and is home to a large ethnic Korean population, has suffered the worst floods in a hundred years this year, with nearly a quarter of its 2.18 million residents affected, according to the Yanbian government.

In Yanbian, torrential rains and floods had destroyed 6,847 houses and forced the evacuation of more than 86,000 people, the prefecture government said Wednesday.

At least 74 people have died in heavy flooding in Jilin over the past two months, and 71 are missing.

As of Wednesday, rain-triggered floods had left 1,072 people dead and 619 missing this year in the whole country, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.