Heavy rains claimed at least 16 lives in Sichuan province's Mianyang city and cut off a crucial highway for quake relief in the region on Friday, authorities said.

A villager wades through flooded makeshift houses in Leigu, Beichuan, in Sichuan province on Thursday. [Wang Jian]

The storms left 48 missing and affected nearly 1.3 million people in the city, official figures showed. More than 50,000 houses were destroyed or damaged, while about 65,000 hectares of crops and 6,000 cattle have been ruined.

Direct economic losses have been put at nearly 1.6 billion yuan ($234 million), with about 652 million yuan coming from the agricultural sector, Chen Wen, an information officer of Mianyang, told China Daily.

The heavy rains have also hit Chengdu, provincial capital of Sichuan, and Deyang, Guangyuan, Leshan, Meishan and Ya'an cities.

Rainstorms lashed the county of Wenchuan, the epicenter of the devastating May 12 earthquake, and caused more than 30 landslides along the Dujiangyan-Wenchuan highway, said Luo Yuhong, deputy chief of the highway bureau under the Sichuan provincial department of communications.

Mud flows that took place around the town of Yingxiu in Wenchuan and the Baihua bridge section of the Dujiangyan-Wenchuan highway had blocked off the major road, local officials said.

Relief personnel were working round the clock to make life-saving repairs to the highway, with more excavators headed for Yingxiu from Chengdu, Luo said.

More landslides were expected to take place on Friday with the rain, making it more difficult for repairs and possibly endangering workers, Luo added.

The Dujiangyan-Wenchuan highway, known as one of the lifelines for transporting quake relief material from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, was reopened to the public on Sept 2 after being damaged by the quake.

Prior to the earthquake, the 95-km highway had 87 bridges: eight of them collapsed and 75 of them were damaged in the tremor. For every kilometer of road on one section of the highway, there was an average of 19 landslides.

(China Daily?September 27, 2008)