ROAD TO RECOVERY

Zhouqu is braced for more rain in coming days, and thousands of troops are still using large excavators to remove silt and debris that block the county roads.

But life is gradually recovering as the relief operation continues.

The county education department said Saturday that primary and middle schools in Zhouqu will start the autumn semester on Aug. 25, 10 days later than scheduled.

This was because hundreds of homes and one primary school were buried and more schools were damaged or inundated in water. Many classrooms are being used as temporary shelters.

By Saturday noon, power supplies had resumed in 8,375 homes, or 76 percent of all homes affected by the blackout.

Vegetables were on sale Saturday for the first time since the disaster. Local authorities ordered 8,400 kg of vegetables from neighboring Longnan City and they sold at the same or lower prices than prior to the disaster.

But new floods and landslides triggered by torrential rains over the past week have brought misery to Longnan and neighboring Sichuan Province.

In Longnan, at least 34 people had died and 63 were missing, said Huang Zeyuan, deputy Party chief of Longnan, at a news conference Sunday.

More than 120,000 people had been evacuated, and direct economic losses were estimated at more than 3 billion yuan (441 million U.S.dollars), Huang said.

"The situation is very tough as rainstorms would likely trigger further geological disasters, such as landslides. We are still in dire need of relief supplies," he said.

In Gansu's neighboring province of Sichuan, floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains this week have killed at least 13 people and left another 59 missing.

Altogether 31 people are missing in Wenchuan County alone, the epicenter of an 8-magnitude earthquake in May 2008 that left about 87,000 people dead or missing.

More than 8,000 villagers have been evacuated from below two "barrier" lakes that were formed after landslides blocked sections of the Minjiang River. Local authorities planned to use explosives to clear the blockages.

China suffered the worst floods in at least a decade this summer.Floods and other rain-triggered disasters have left more than 2,300 people dead and 1,200 missing nationwide this year.