| Just you wait til that dam blows ... |
China's Sichuan province faced the threat of epidemics on Wednesday after the worst flooding in a century killed at least 172 people and left scores missing, while water levels at the huge Three Gorges Dam swelled. Villages in Hubei province along the Yangtze River downstream of the dam braced for disaster, but officials declared the world's largest hydroelectric project ready to cope with the floodwaters.
| Finished caulking the cracks, did they? |
Police and People's Liberation Army soldiers were bringing relief to 6,000 stranded residents of Dazhou city in southwestern Sichuan and other areas trying to recover from what the official Xinhua news agency described as a "catastrophe which is not likely to happen in a century." Most of the deaths in Sichuan and Chongqing municipality to the east were caused by landslides, fast-moving mud-and-rock flows and flash floods sweeping through mountain valleys from Thursday to Monday, Xinhua said. Officials put the number of injured in the two places at 13,200. Hubei was on flood alert with increased patrols along dams on the Yangtze as the Three Gorges Dam would be challenged on Wednesday by the largest flood peak since 1998, Xinhua said. Massive plumes of water have been spewing from the floodgates to ease pressure from the floodwaters. "The dam is very safe," an official at the Yangtze River Three Gorges Navigational Bureau told Reuters, adding that it was designed to handle twice the peak water flows.
| He then excused himself, and he and his family could later be seen loading their possessions onto a truck. |
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