Millions brace for flood surge

A boatman guides his boat near buildings flooded by rising waters on the Huarong River.

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- China's flood surge is heading towards the city of Wuhan, with a population of seven million, where the high water levels are expected to reach Monday.

Authorities are shoring up defences in the central Chinese city, but officials say a disaster is unlikely.

Fresh rains in the Hunan region Monday morning threatened to put renewed pressure on the swollen Dongting Lake and dispel cautious optimism that the flood crisis in the central China province has peaked.

A slow moving front is bringing moderate to heavy rain to the flood-ravaged region with some forecasters predicting this weather system could drop up to 55 millimeters (2 inches) of rain by Tuesday.

The areas expected to be hardest hit are in northern Hunan and the western provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan.

The renewed rainfall is a blow to authorities who hope the giant Donting lake has crested and slowly begun to ebb after hundreds of thousands of people worked around the clock to erect barriers around its shoreline.

The lake reached a peak of 34.91 meters (114.5 feet) late Saturday, the government's Anti-Flooding Command Center said. The water level was down just a tenth of an inch early Sunday.

Evacuations

MORE STORIES CNN's Jaime Florcruz says Chinese authorities are cautiously optimistic that the worst of the flooding is over (August 26) Play video Dereliction of duty:  Officials slept as waters rose   RESOURCES Gallery: Flash floods devastate China      QUICKVOTE Do you think Beijing could do more to ease China's annual flooding problem? Yes No Don't know View Results

Huge squads of farmers tossed sandbags, rocks and soil into leaks to prevent them becoming breaches.

More than 800,000 others, including soldiers and volunteers, worked to buttress the levees and dikes with sandbags and organize the evacuation of residents near the lake, which is twice the size of Hong Kong.

In one area, 1,500 civilians and 400 soldiers had rushed to a section of dyke which sprang nine leaks to plug them with sandbags and gravel, but the situation appeared to be under control, officials said.

Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated.

Heavy rains have swamped Hunan province since August 11.

Even more rain was dumped this past weekend when Tropical Storm Vongfong swept through the region. The storm also spread rain northward and westward over the provinces of Guandong, Yunnan and Guangxi, which lie just north of Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.

Officials declared a state of emergency Wednesday for Hunan province. Hundreds of thousands of people, their homes flooded or destroyed, have been evacuated from the region.

Threat remains

Hunan's capital, Changsha, has been flooded by one of the rivers that flows into Dongting Lake, about three hours to the north. There have been no reports of deaths from the current flooding around Dongting Lake, but more than 900 have been killed in flooding since China's monsoon season began three months ago.

Even though Dongting's waters are receding, the annual danger of the Yangtze is far from over.

The fresh storms could strain dikes on the lake and the rivers which feed into it, threatening six cities and dozens of villages in Hunan province.

The work squads, some numbering 10,000, have not always been successful.

Witnesses quoted by Reuters news agency said at least one small village 10 km (six miles) south of Yueyang, a city near Dongting's northeast shore, had been submerged after a minor breach of a dyke.

Nevertheless, the mood in the area was generally calm and, for those not on the front lines, scouring the dykes for leaks and rushing to plug them, life went on as usual.

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.

-- CNN Beijing Bureau Chief Jaime FlorCruz contributed to this report.