Word: flood
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...frequent disasters made the government look ineffectual, and that forced Premier Zhu Rongji, himself a Hunan native, to take action in 1998. According to Liang Haitang, a Hunan-based supervisor for WWF, an international conservation organization, Zhu dreamed up "the wisest flood control policy ever issued...
...order, eight lines that read more like a poem than a proclamation, stressed "New homes for the people" and "Provide livelihoods not relief." The aim is, in effect, to go with the flow. The government will move millions of people out of the flood plain around Dongting Lake. Many will give up rice farming for other businesses. Where their homes once stood will be a chain of shallow lakes and wetlands that can absorb the water that surges down the Yangtze and other rivers. Already 1.8 million people have moved, with another million expected to pack up over the coming...
...ordered. A pumping station worked day and night to lift water from her fields over a dike and into Dongting Lake. But the dike ruptured in 1996 and swept away Hu's earthen house. Her family rebuilt it in brick, which they thought would withstand anything. Then the flood that hit two years later took half of the house away again. "I dreamed of moving higher, but we had no money," she says...
...policy to work, the locals have to cooperate as Hu did. Some refuse. They pocket the government's money, but leave the pumps running and continue planting in the flood plain. When the government breaches a dike, villagers sometimes repair it so they can continue sowing. "These lands are only half restored," says Yu Xiubo of the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Sciences. But the program is still new. "It takes time," says Jim Harkness, China director for WWF, "for people to lose their nervousness at giving up rice farming." China may have helped create the flood problem that plagues...
...could have become the hero of the floods." VIT KAHLE, Prague Zoo spokesman, lamenting the death by exhaustion of Gaston, a seal who escaped his enclosure as flood waters rose and swam 300 km before expiring...