An army of Chinese flood fighters is struggling to plug leaks in the vast dyke network around swollen Dongting Lake, seeking to shield the homes of millions as a flood crest neared and more rain loomed.
But flood control officials around the lake said they were increasingly confident there would be no disaster, despite a flood peak moving down the Yangtze river due to hit the lake tomorrow morning and weathermen predicting heavy rain.
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Chinese civil militia make a drainage ditch to divert water at a dyke in Yongji township in Yueyang in China's southern Hunan province Photograph: Reuters
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On another hot and sunny day in the battle to contain a lake the size of Luxembourg, huge squads of peasant farmers rushed in sandbags, rocks and soil to shore up weak points in the defensive wall.
But the officials said the lake would have to rise another metre to overwhelm defenses reinforced heavily since 1998, when China's worst summer floods in decades killed 4,000 people.
Officials in Hunan said the heavy rains which pounded the southern province for days until a break in the weather on Wednesday were expected to resume on Sunday. But that should mean only that the water level in Dongting Lake would recede more slowly than anticipated.
Officials said they had contingency plans to evacuate 100,000 people if the dykes burst and teams had toiled throughout the night to plug holes in them.
China's summer floods have killed more than 900 people already this year and even if Dongting's dykes hold, the danger will be far from over. The Yangtze flood crest will roll on downriver toward Wuhan, a city of more than seven million people already working frantically to shore up its defenses.
The controversial Three Gorges Dam upstream, the world's largest hydroelectric project, is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but it will not be completed until 2009.