Six people were confirmed killed and another 38 soldiers and their relatives were missing after floods destroyed the military barracks in the eastern province of Jiangxi on Wednesday, the state flood control headquarters said.

President Hu Jintao called for "prompt and all out efforts" to find those missing from the barracks, it said in a report on its website.

The official Xinhua news agency put the latest death toll at 25, with 53 missing. However, local officials gave a higher tally of the number of people missing.

Jiangxi was one of the areas worst hit by Kaemi, which struck mainland China on Tuesday night before weakening into a tropical storm. Officials said nearly 10,000 homes had been destroyed by floods in the province and more than 400,000 people were affected.

Power supplies for more than 20,000 households were cut off after mountain torrents seriously damaged electricity networks in Shangyou county, the worst-hit area in Jiangxi, Xinhua said.

In neighboring Fujian province, gale, rainstorm, floods, landslides and mud-rock flows from Kaemi destroyed 116,000 houses and ruined 48,700 hectares (120,289 acres) of crops, Xinhua said.

Aside from the military barracks disaster, 17 other people had been killed in Jiangxi and 15 more were missing, Xinhua said, citing the latest official statistics.

Television footage showed rivers overflowing their banks and sweeping through valleys and lowlands.

State press said four people were killed in flood-related landslides in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Hainan over the past two days.

In Hunan province more than 10 centimeters (four inches) of rain had fallen in some areas since Tuesday, the state flood headquarters said.

More than 1.38 million people in Chenzhou were affected by Kaemi's rains, while 6,000 homes collapsed due to flooding and 280,000 people were evacuated.

Across south and southeast China, around one million people had been evacuated from their homes.

Worse was expected to come this week with the meteorological administration warning of more rain in much of the south and southeast until Friday night.

Typhoon Kaemi came almost immediately after the end of Tropical Storm Bilis, which claimed more than 600 lives in the same areas of China during a 10-day downpour.

Southern and central China has suffered two months of brutal weather, with authorities reporting over the weekend before Kaemi struck that more than 1,300 people had died from weather-related disasters since May.

Vice Premier Hui Liangyu on Thursday called for more precise weather forecasts and early warnings to reduce the impact of disasters, Xinhua said.

China's typhoon season normally occurs in August and September.

But Typhoon Chanchu, the first of the season this year, hit in mid-May. Kaemi is the fifth of the year.

"The main characteristics of this series of typhoons are that they have come earlier than normal and that their effect on the inland areas of China has been rather serious," said Yang Ke, a meteorologist with the China Meteorological Administration.

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