2 U.S. Soldiers Killed in S. Korea Flooding

Fresh rains fell on South Korea’s saturated capital Saturday, triggering new mudslides and floods that killed at least seven people--including two American soldiers--and forced tens of thousands to flee.

Two U.S. Army soldiers died after being buried under mud at their camp south of Seoul. Twelve others were injured, and 10 of them were hospitalized, said Col. Carl Kropf, a military spokesman. He declined to give names pending notification of relatives.

The soldiers were with the 304th Signal Battalion of the 8th Army’s 1st Signal Brigade, Kropf said.

Saturday’s deaths brought to 212 the number of people killed by a storm front that swept in from China seven days earlier and has wreaked havoc in South Korea.

Many of the thousands forced to flee their homes Saturday had evacuated them in the face of floods Thursday. Only hours after their return Friday, they again had to seek higher ground because of torrential overnight rains.

At least two Han River tributaries overflowed, submerging 30,000 homes in and around Seoul, disaster officials said.

About 1,000 U.S. soldiers were evacuated from several small camps near the border with communist North Korea, said Sgt. Maj. Billy Foster of the 2nd Infantry Division.

In China on Saturday, workers in central Hubei province remained on alert to blow up dikes in a bid to spare cities downriver from the worst of recent flooding that has already killed more than 2,000 people, officials said.

About 330,000 people have been evacuated from an area that would be flooded if the government gave the last-ditch order to dynamite the dikes, the officials said.

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They said the workers had decided not to blow up a key dike as a crest of water on the swollen Yangtze River raged past and headed for the flood-racked lower reaches.

About 230 miles to the east, residents of Jiujiang in central Jiangxi province were bracing for the flood crest while battling a widening breach in the city’s flood defenses, residents and officials said.

Flood workers sank eight boats loaded with rock, as well as thousands of tons of rice, coal and soybeans, into the gap but still failed to staunch the flow, and, by Saturday, 1 1/2 square miles of the city were submerged, the state-run New China News Agency said.

A Jiujiang official said the greater part of the city, which has a total population of 500,000, remained dry. “The fundamental situation is stable,” he said.

Other cities along the Yangtze, China’s longest river, are being hammered by storms traveling inland from the south and east.

Torrential rains have lashed central and eastern China for weeks and pushed rivers and lakes to their highest levels since 1954, triggering the devastating floods, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

More than 14 million people have had to abandon their homes, while 240 million, a fifth of the population, have been affected.