Wu Shengsong was on his fifth night in a row patroling the banks of the Xi River, in east China’s Jiangxi province, when lightning lit up the sky and he feared that worse was yet to come.
“I’m a little worried,” he said on Saturday. “The forecast is for several days of rain.”
Wu works as an official in the village of Wanli, close to Poyang Lake, China’s largest freshwater lake. By Sunday morning, after a heavy downpour and a release of floodwater from the Yangtze River upstream, the lake’s water level had risen to an all-time high of more than to 74 feet, putting many of the towns and villages that lie beyond the dike that surrounds it at risk.
Wanli is just one of many villages to be hit b
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Jul 13, 2020