Water Woe

Wicked Pennsylvania flood waters drowned a dozen persons last week. In New York harassed Governor Herbert H. Lehman dashed about inspecting the $25,000,000 wreckage left by an upstate flood that had taken 42 lives. And in China the colossal Yangtze and Hwangho Rivers cut loose with a deluge of Biblical fury, drowned as many as 1,000 Chinese in a single hour, kept right on drowning them by thousands and left wasp-waisted little Chinese Dictator Chiang Kai-shek once more acutely conscious that, when the heavens are angry, praying, trembling man is no better than a water rat.

Central, prosperous Hankow, a teeming city (pop. 1,500,000) sometimes called "the Chicago of China," cowered in collective panic as most of the subsidiary dike systems were swept away and the great Chang-kung Dike built of cement under foreign supervision in 1931 held precariously. Amphibian planes reconnoitering above Hankow reported that for miles around the fertile countryside had become a boiling sea with humans clinging to treetops, fated to starve if not to drown. Four presumably crazed Chinese caught near Hankow attempting to breach a dike were instantly shot. Seeping waters invaded even the sacrosanct property of Standard Oil and the Japanese Concession, and a wall of British-American Tobacco Co. fell like the crack of doom. Said the U. S. chief engineer of the Yangtze River Conservation Commission, Col. G. C. Strobe: "The Chang-kung Dike cannot stand for more than another day."

An unconfirmed report said that farther upstream the City of Ichang (pop. 60,000) disappeared with a woosh, was "wiped out." But all this was merely the doing of the Yangtze ("Willow") River, sometimes called "The River of Golden Sand" by poets because of its yellow silt. Farther north the Hwangho or Yellow River, equally bilious in color, was re-earning last week its age-old nickname. "China's Sorrow." In 1854 the Hwangho. which had emptied for half a millennium into the Yellow Sea, arose in a flood so cataclysmic that it changed its entire course and now empties into the Gulf of Chihli some 250 miles north. Last week "China's Sorrow" was rising in such terrifying volume that China's greatest flood experts said that they could not predict whether it would switch back to its course of 1854 or perhaps take an entirely unprecedented direction surging into thickly peopled valleys in which unsuspecting tens of thousands would be trapped.

Though Chinese often take a morbid pleasure in exaggerating the statistics of their woe, the Government seemed justified in thinking last week that at least 25,000,000 Chinese face anything from inundation of their homes to starvation or drowning as a result of the floods now loosed.

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