China’s flood-hit Sichuan province faced threats from disease yesterday while recovering from the worst flooding in a century as villages downstream on the Yangtze River braced for deluges.

Water levels were expected to peak today in the reservoir of the massive Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province. Officials declared the world’s largest hydroelectric project ready to cope with upstream floods that have already killed 161 people. Police and People’s Liberation Army soldiers were bringing relief to 6,000 stranded residents of Dazhou city in Sichuan province and other areas trying to recover from what the official Xinhua news agency described as a “catastrophe which is not likely to happen in a century”.

Most of the deaths in Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality to the east were caused by landslides, fast-moving mud-and-rock flows and flash floods sweeping through mountain valleys. Soldiers were delivering supplies and ferrying residents to high ground by boat on muddy brown waters covering what just days ago were busy city thoroughfares.

<B>Brian Rhoads

Nick Macfie</B>