Beijing - Heavy rains triggered flooding and landslides that killed 74 people on the weekend in southern and eastern China, news reports and local officials said Sunday. At least 55 people died in flooding from several rivers that breached their banks in nine provinces including Hubei, Guangdong and Guizhou, and more than 1.2 million people were displaced, Xinhua news agency reported.
Nineteen workers died when a landslide buried a brick factory in Luliang in Shanxi Province on Friday, the local government said. One worker was rescued.
The torrential rains destroyed more than 10,000 houses, disrupted traffic and caused landslides in the provinces of Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei and Anhui.
A section of the Xijiang River in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was about to burst its banks, posing a threat to tens of thousands of people, Xinhua reported quoting local authorities.
Nearly 120,000 people were forced to flee their homes in Longhua village as water began gushing in from a 40-metre crack on the river's Dayaochong embankment in Changzhou Town, officials said.
A 5-metre-high temporary dyke was being built in the area to in a bid to prevent flooding of western Wuzhou City, located near the border between Guangxi and Guagdong Province.
"If the crack widened and the dyke collapsed, the flood would directly threaten the safety of the western part of Wuzhou City, Zhang Jishen, a Changzhou District official said.
Wuzhou City experienced its worst flooding in 100 years in 2005.
Heavy rains were forecast for most parts of rain-drenched southern China over the next 10 days, and some regions would probably hit by strong gales and thunderstorms, China Meteorological Administration said Sunday.
Officials in Guangdong Province said the flooding was the worst in half a century.
In the Pearl River area covering Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, about 7.6 million people were affected and 11,200 houses collapsed. Some 421,000 hectares of crops were affected, more than half of which were inundated, according to the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
Rainstorms were expected to lash the Xijiang River, Liujiang River and Guijiang River, major tributaries of the Pearl River, between Sunday and Wednesday, relief officials said, according to Xinhua.
