by John Sparrow in Hunan
The villagers in China's southerly
Hunan province knew a flood was coming but the speed and magnitude overwhelmed
them.
Rescuers who made it to farmer Li Baling's home 200 metres from a tributary of the Yuan river carried his wife to safety but could not reach the old man. Terrified as water rose around him, he climbed onto the roof.
Then the biggest flash flood in living memory carried him and his house away.
Debris battered him in the torrent but he caught hold of a passing timber and hung on. Thirty minutes and ten kilometres later, he was drifting semi-conscious past another village when he was spotted from the bank. Men jumped into the stream and pulled him to safety.
While Li Baling would live to tell his tale, his problems were only beginning. His home is now one of the Red Cross tents that house the homeless on a dyke above Dian Ya, his devastated village in Yuan Lin county.
He cannot walk.
Bones in his feet are broken. Time will heal his injuries, the old man says, but will not lessen his impoverishment. All he had is gone, along with the livelihood he eked from the village's rice fields.
He is not alone. Across the stricken county, late June's floods left 16,000 people homeless. Thirteen people are dead, ten are missing, 430 homes were destroyed and 2,500 damaged.
According to the authorities, more than 300 millimetres of rain fell in 12 hours, causing ten tributaries of the Yuan to flood and damage to be done to almost 600 villages and 42 townships. China's annual floods have started again and with them the misery of poor people made even poorer.
As a result of six days of severe rainstorms, floods and landslides, 180,000 people had to be relocated across Hunan. In neighbouring Guizhou province, four prefectures were stricken and to the west rainstorms lashed Sichuan as well. There, 15 people died and another seven are missing.
On Friday, China's Vice Premier Hui Liangyu called on authorities to mobilize in anticipation of worse to come. Meteorological departments are saying large-scale floods could be in the offing and, making matters worse, drought is expected to plague other areas. The world's most populous country will be in double jeopardy this summer.
The scale of China's disasters is beyond normal terms. Last year floods struck 30 provinces and official statistics show that close to two and a half million houses were destroyed, 220 million people were affected and 20 million hectares of farmland damaged.
Droughts took their toll over another 25 million hectares. Economic losses were estimated at US$ 24 billion.
Since serious flooding of the Yangtze River in 1998, China has spent billions of dollars in flood mitigation and prevention, and in Hunan alone almost $3 billion has been invested.
Officials argue that besides improving human safety, flood control measures have revitalized urbanization, brought local economic and social development and substantially improved living standards.
But in this vast and flood-prone country, the defences are not universal. A senior Hunan official emphasized the importance of defending main towns and infrastructure. He conceded,
"Our resources are such we cannot take care of every village."
Dian Ya, it would seem, was among them.
Along the dyke, homeless women wailed, some for the loss of loved ones, others out of desperation. Li Baling's wife was among them. She rocked back and forth on the ground and cried, "There is nothing left. All we have is what we are wearing."
There was little enough to begin with. China's great economic march forward has not reached this district. Young men leave it to be migrant workers in the booming parts of the country and now have even less reason to return. Villages have been affected for 50 kilometres along the river.
The rain caused it to rise between seven and nine metres, sweeping out of a broad flood plain that had always contained it for as long as anyone could remember. Debris in trees and power lines, and a layer of mud, bore testimony to its passage. Furniture lay in the streets to dry, mud was being shovelled from houses.
Slowly but surely Dian Ya was coming back to life. The health post whose stocks had been swept away was open again, concerned by an increase in headaches, fever and diarrhoea in the community.
But more than people, houses and infrastructure had been lost in the flood. The rice fields had been inundated, a September harvest lost, and a deposit of sand that covered many a plot meant rice would not grow there again.
The authorities reported that more than a third of the district's farmland could not be replanted. Li Baling's plot is one of them.
Where will he go? What will he do? Would his house be replaced by winter? Officials were doing what they could.
The Hunan Red Cross, which pre-positions relief in the province, had distributed tents, quilts, clothes, water purification tablets and disinfectants, and its medical teams were active. But no one, for now, had answers to those questions. The follow up, the Red Cross says, is critical.
Elsewhere in the prefecture it was assisting mass evacuation. The riverside village of Huayuan in Beirong township resembled a conflict area. Along the main street people were packing, moving out as though on the run from an approaching army.
The threat was in the hillsides above them. The rain had brought landslides crashing down, destroying homes, killing two people who were sleeping. More slides could be expected and 1,800 people were leaving.
They scurried down to boats with all they could carry, or waited their turn, sitting outside among their possessions. Shops were closing down, selling off stock. Old people looked bewildered.
No one seemed to know where they were headed. The authorities would take them to safety and then look for a final destination. They were refugees from natural disaster.