ZHENGZHOU, Sept. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- Though 30 years have passed, remorse, sighs and sympathy were common feelings among attendees who convened a seminar in this capital city of central Henan Province to commemorate an accident that had long been ignored nationwide.

    A miserable story about China's most devastating dams bursts that caused thousands of lives in the province in August 1975 was unfolded by 150 officials, meteorologists, hydrologists from China, the United States and Italy at the seminar on Sept. 15, only three days after China announced to declassify its natural disaster death tolls.

    HORRIBLE MEMORIES

    On Aug. 7, 1975, just a day before the tragedy, all most nobody in Zhumadian, a city about 1,000 km south of Beijing in Henan, were aware that a catastrophe was looming.

    A pouring rain following the third typhoon that battered China that year soaked the area with then about 7 million population, swollen more than 100 medium or small reservoirs with a rainfall recorded at 1,060 millimeter in 24 hours near the typhoon center.

    "When the rain continued, the days were like nights as rain fell like arrows," survivors were quoted as saying by official records. "The mountains were covered all over by dead sparrows after the rain."

    The 24.5-meter dam of Banqiao Reservoir which took over the most rain from the typhoon first breached at wee hours of Aug. 8, releasing within six hours 700 million cubic meters of floods that wiped Daowencheng Commune downstream immediately from the map, killing all 9,600 citizens.

    "The blare of the dam burst sounded like the sky was collapsing and the earth was cracking," survivors recalled. "Houses and trees disappeared all in a instant. Numerous corpses and bodies of cattle floated in water amid people's wailing for help."

    To worsen the situation, the dams of the city's other 61 reservoirs collapsed one after another within a short period, unleashing about 6 billion cubic meters of floods to an area of about 10,000 square kilometers.

    Official statistics recorded 30 years after the dams bursts show more than 26,000 people were killed in the floods, the life of more than 10 million people was affected and all communication to and from the city were cut off. But some meteorologists and researchers said the figure might be even bigger.

    "The number may be revised some day in future," said Wang Yanrong, an official with Henan Province Department of Water Resources who has studied the province's flood disaster death tolls for years. "It depends on further and more thorough study of related files, documents and our data."