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  Straits Times 14 Jul 07
It's raining rats in Hunan province
Region overrun by 2 billion rats as worst flood in 50 years hits eastern China

National Gerographic 11 Jul 07
"Two Billion" Rats Invade China Lake Towns
Stefan Lovgren in Wuhan, China for National Geographic News

For the past two weeks residents living around China's second largest lake have been able to smell a rat—make that two billion rats.

When the Yangtze River flooded on June 23, the water level rose in Dongting Lake, which sits along the river south of Wuhan in central China's Hunan Province.

The flooding began flushing out rat holes around the lake, triggering a literal rat race for higher ground.

Since then farming communities in more than 20 counties near Dongting have been overrun, observers say.

"For the past week, the situation has been very serious," Tan Lulu, who works for the international conservation group WWF, told National Geographic News from WWF's Hunan office in Changsha.

Farmers are using everything from poison to hammers—and even their bare hands—to kill the rodents, Lulu noted.

"There are so many rats that you can kill three of them with one [strike]," she said, adding that the banks of the lake are carpeted with dead rats.

Rat Poison

About two billion rodents have been coursing through the region, according to Chinese media reports, although it's not clear how this number was determined.

The rats have ravaged at least 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of farmland by eating the roots and stems of crops, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

In response, several news reports note, residents in the district of Dahu have killed more than 2.3 million rats—or 90 tons of the rodents—since the invasion began.

To combat the problem, local authorities have distributed rat poison in the affected areas. Sanitation staff has also been dispatched to prevent disease outbreaks.

In some places around Dongting Lake, 2-foot-tall (0.6-meter-tall) concrete walls have been hastily built to keep the rodents away from farms.

"The current focus is on educating the villagers in protecting themselves while killing the rats, and supervising the local health situation," Peng Zaizhi, director of the emergency control division of the Hunan provincial disease prevention and control center, told the China Daily.

Environmental Degradation

Dongting Lake is officially considered to be 1,058 square miles (2,740 square kilometers).

But the lake is a flood basin of the Yangtze River, and its actual size fluctuates with seasonal rains.

Lulu, of the WWF, said a drought preceding the recent flooding exacerbated the rat problem.

"The drought exposed land that used to be the lake, and the rodents took up residence there," she said. "When that land became submerged, the rats fled to higher ground."

The region has also been affected by the cutting and replanting of trees for two paper mills near the lake.

"Dongting Lake used to be a beautiful place," Lulu said, "but it has become very polluted."

Straits Times 14 Jul 07
It's raining rats in Hunan province
Region overrun by 2 billion rats as worst flood in 50 years hits eastern China

BEIJING - HUNDREDS of thousands of villagers in eastern China were fleeing the worst flood from a major river in more than 50 years yesterday, and facing shortages of medicine, fuel and food.

One province was planning a 40km-long, 1m-high fence to keep back an estimated two billion rats escaping from an overflowing lake.

Emergency workers in the poverty-stricken eastern province of Anhui breached another dyke in a bid to ease pressure on the Huai River, which is suffering its worst flood since 1954, Xinhua news agency reported. Villagers living within the walls of the Shiyaowan dyke were evacuated. Officials used sirens and deployed troops to round up about 10,000 residents, to take them to higher ground.

In Anhui, where no fewer than 27 people have been killed in the past two weeks in floods, landslides or the collapse of houses triggered by heavy rains, six rural 'flood reserve areas' were deliberately submerged to ease pressure on other areas.

A summer of torrential rains across the country has caused floods and landslides that killed 403 people and left 105 missing by Thursday and economic losses of 32 billion yuan (S$6.4 billion).

In the Mengwa area, where homes and crops belonging to 157,800 people were ruined, evacuated residents were facing shortages of medicine, disinfectants, fuel and vegetables.

'We've been eating green peppers and soy beans harvested just before the water rose for days,' villager Qiao Rulan was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

The authorities have been shipping flour, rice, noodles and cooking oil to temporary shelters isolated by flood waters more than 2m deep. 'The villagers are also worried that it will be difficult to cook because they will run out of wood. They hope the government can provide some coal,' Xinhua said.

Tens of thousands of People's Liberation Army troops were helping in rescue efforts along the Huai River, which originates in the central province of Henan and runs east through densely populated and rural parts of Henan, Anhui and coastal Jiangsu. Jiangsu mobilised more than 200,000 people for a 24-hour inspection of the river's embankments as the water level rose rapidly.

Downpours since late last month have also caused landslides and floods that killed at least 42 people in the south-western province of Sichuan.

Residents faced the arduous task of cleaning up and reconstruction, state media said. Forecasters warned yesterday that heavy downpours in the coming days across Henan as well as in south-west and central China could bring more floods and landslides.

Officials in the central province of Hunan were raising 6 million yuan to build a fence to stop rat invasions as two billion rodents fleeing the rising waters of the Dongting Lake plagued farmland.

The plague has cost Yueyang city 6 million yuan in economic losses. Residents are trying to kill the rats with anything from clubs and shovels to poison, the Beijing News said.

Experts blame the plague partly on the shortage of owls and snakes, hunted for their perceived value in traditional Chinese medicine. REUTERS
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