China flood season toll 536, but worse yet to come

WUZHOU, China, Friday (Reuters) A bus was swept away by fast, muddy flood waters in south China and passengers were missing, the latest in a string of disasters across the country where 536 people have died in floods and landslides this year.

Torrential rain has pushed rivers above their bursting points and triggered mudslides in the past week, killing at least 97 people and leaving 41 missing, state media said on Friday.

As rain inundated the south, the dirt-poor central province of Anhui was suffering widespread drought and a heatwave in the capital, Beijing, in the north lifted the temperature on Thursday to close to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit)

In the hard-hit industrial city of Wuzhou, in the southern Guangxi region, houses on the banks of the Xijiang river have been flooded up to their roofs and downtown residents have been forced to move to upper-storey apartments or to flee to higher ground.

People have fashioned make-shift boats and on Friday were cruising around flooded streets in turbid waters at the level of bare electrical lines seeking food and other necessities.

Eighteen people were missing in Fujian province to the east after flood waters washed a bus and a pickup truck off a national highway on Thursday, state media said.

There was no clear death toll in Wuzhou, but locals say some elderly people who refused to evacuate were likely killed when the floods washed in, swelling up to four stories tall down narrow streets. And with the flooding set to peak on the Xijiang river and others in south China, there are fears the real disaster has yet to hit.

"More than 100,000 people and soldiers are now bracing themselves for the worst peak of the floods on the (Xijiang) river as it passes Guangxi," an official from the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters was quoted as saying in the China Daily.

Some 1.4 million people have been evacuated in six southern provinces, where the week's floods have caused over 11 billion yuan ($1.33 billion) in direct economic losses and inundated huge tracks of crop land, Xinhua news agency said.