BEIJING — Floods sweeping through northeastern China have left more than 100 people dead or missing after 10 days of downpours, state media said Sunday,
Waters have cut off roads, left villages inaccessible and knocked out communications and water supplies in the hardest-hit areas, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
About 37,000 houses have been swept away while floodwaters damaged 125,000 others, the report said. About 592,000 residents have been evacuated from waterlogged areas.
"The flood is unprecedented. Its devastation is appalling," Sun Jingyuan, a top official in Antu County in Jilin's Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian was quoted as saying.
Seventy houses in a village in Antu were wiped out, while 570 families were forced to leave their homes in a mountain valley after the area was submerged beneath 20 metres (66 feet) of water, the report said.
Soldiers reached the isolated town of Liangjiang late Saturday to help 10,000 residents evacuate, Sun said.
Further downstream, soldiers, police and firemen continued to retrieve thousands of barrels full of explosive chemicals that were washed away by flood waters into the Songhua River.
Water supplies to the nearby city of Jilin were temporarily cut after the incident on Wednesday, leaving 4.3 million people dependent on bottled water.
A total of 7,000 barrels were washed into the river, with around half of them containing volatile chemicals, Xinhua said.
Around 6,400 barrels had been recovered by Sunday evening, Xinhua said, but it was not clear how many of them contained the toxic substances.
Boats were chained together across the 500-metre (1,650-foot) -wide waterway to block the barrels from going further downstream, but officials in neighboring Heilongjiang confirmed the chemicals had affected their water.
The barrels were being rapidly swept down the river, after the Fengman Dam floodgates opened Friday afternoon, and experts feared the barrels could explode if they hit a dam further downstream.
Until now, torrential rains have mostly hit China's south, swelling the Yangtze River -- the nation's longest waterway -- and some of its tributaries to dangerous levels.
The worst flooding in a decade has left more than 1,000 dead and hundreds missing since the beginning of the year and caused more than 28 billion dollars of damage, according to the latest official figures, and authorities have warned of more to come.
