Almost four million people have been hit by monsoon floods in South Asia, officials said Tuesday, with a third of Bangladesh already underwater from some of the heaviest rains in a decade.

The monsoon -- which usually falls from June to September -- is crucial to the economy of the Indian sub-continent, but also causes widespread death and destruction across the region each year.

"This is going to be the worst flood in a decade," Bangladesh's Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre chief Arifuzzaman Bhuiyan told AFP.

The heavy rains have swollen two main Himalayan river systems -- the Brahmaputra and the Ganges -- that flow through India and Bangladesh.

Bhuiyan said about a third of flood-prone Bangladesh -- a delta-nation crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers -- was underwater, and at least 1.5 million people were affected, with village homes and roads flooded.

In north-central Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra river was almost 40 centimetres (16 inches) higher than normal and threatening to burst its banks, district administrator Farook Ahmed told AFP.

Most villagers were trying to stay near their flood-damaged homes, but some 15,000 had fled severely affected areas, officials said.

With a 10-day forecast pointing to rising waters, Bhuiyan said if more rivers burst their banks some 40 percent of the nation could be flooded "in a worst-case scenario".

In the northern town of Biswambharpur, villagers said most of the houses were partly underwater after the Surma, a major river in northeast Bangladesh, burst its banks.

Farmer Abdur Rashid, 35, said he sent his wife and three children to a multi-storied village school that has been turned into a government shelter.

"My whole house has gone underwater. I have sent the rest of the family to the school, but I stayed behind to guard my properties," Rashid told AFP.

- Twin challenges -

In Assam, northeast India, more than 2.1 million people have been affected since mid-May.

At least 50 people have died so far -- 12 in the past week as floodwaters surged -- with tens of thousands of mostly rural residents evacuated to relief camps, officials said.

Emergency services personnel wore head-to-toe bright-orange suits to protect themselves from the floods and coronavirus -- which has infected almost 17,000 people in Assam -- as they used boats to reach stranded villagers.

"We have two challenges here, one is COVID-19 and another is (the) flood," the head of a local rescue team, Abhijeet Kumar Verma, told AFP.

In Nepal, at least 50 people have died in landslides and floods triggered by the monsoon rains, with homes swept away and roads and bridges damaged.

"We are distributing food and relief goods from helicopters to about 300 displaced families after the roads were blocked by floods and landslides," district official Gyan Nath Dahal told AFP.

China rushes to contain floods after record rainfall
Shanghai (AFP) July 14, 2020 - Soldiers erected sandbag flood barriers in a city near China's largest freshwater lake after the heaviest rainfall in nearly six decades drenched the swollen Yangtze River basin.

The vast Yangtze drainage area has been lashed by torrential rains since last month, leaving 141 people dead or missing and forcing the evacuation of millions more across several provinces.

Flooding along the river -- the world's third longest -- has been an annual summer scourge since ancient times, but this year's inundation has been especially severe.

The downpours have intensified since last week, causing dozens of Yangtze-basin waterways to post record-high water levels, while more than 400 had exceeded warning levels, Vice Minister of Emergency Management Zheng Guoguang said on Monday.

"Since June, average precipitation in the Yangtze river basin has been the highest since 1961," he told a news briefing in Beijing.

Authorities had been monitoring a flood crest as it neared Wuhan, the metropolis of 11 million that the Yangtze winds through and which had already suffered the vast number of China's deaths and cases in the coronavirus pandemic, which first emerged in the city.

They said river levels were decreasing after the crest passed Wuhan on Monday with no reports of major new flooding there.

- Record rainfall -

Concern was now shifting downstream to Poyang Lake, which drains into the Yangtze in hard-hit Jiangxi province and is the largest freshwater lake fully within China's borders.

State-run Xinhua news agency said water levels at a key hydrological station on the lake broke a record set in 1998, when more than 4,000 people were killed in China's worst flooding in recent decades.

State media reported that more than 100,000 people -- including rescue personnel, soldiers, and ordinary citizens -- had been thrown into flood-control efforts in Jiangxi.

Around half of those were deployed at Poyang Lake, where many dikes and levees had collapsed, state television reported.

In the city of Jiujiang, near where the lake drains into the Yangtze, soldiers wearing orange life vests fortified the river bank with a wall of sandbags piled as high as a man.

The Yangtze's length is exceeded only by the Nile and the Amazon, and its drainage basin is home to around 400 million people.

Summer rains and seasonal glacial melt in the river's Tibetan plateau headwaters cause routine annual flooding.

But environmentalists say the threat has worsened over the decades due in part to rampant construction of dams and levees that have cut connections between the river and adjacent lakes and floodplains that for centuries had helped absorb the summer surge.

Conservationists also warn that the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers due to climate change may lead to more dangerous summer flooding.

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Venice completes first test of all flood barriers
Rome (AFP) July 10, 2020
Venice's long awaited flood defence system designed to protect the lagoon city from damaging waters during high tides on Friday survived a first test of its 78 barriers. The massive infrastructure project known as MOSE, which relies on sluice gates that can be raised to protect the city's lagoon during high tides, has been underway since 2003, but has been plagued by cost overruns, corruption scandals and delays. The complex engineering system uses a network of water-filled caissons, designed to ... read more