Maputo  - Mozambican authorities have ordered tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in the Limpopo river valley near Kruger National Park after one of the floodgates on a dam on the river broke.

According to Olinda Sousa, director general of the southern water authority ARA-Sul, the gate on Massingir Dam was releasing water at the rate of 1,000 cubic metres of water per second, well above its normal rate.

Twenty-two localities near the river were ordered to immediately evacuate, Sousa said.

The breakage, which occurred despite recent repairs on the dam, comes as it fills to unseasonally high levels.

The water is close to the level it hit in 2000, when 700 people were killed and half a million displaced in southern Mozambique in the worst flooding in the region in recent memory.

During that year's summer rainy season Mozambique was forced to open the floodgates on the dam, flooding the nearby towns of Chokwe and Xai-Xai and damaging infrastructure in the world-famous Kruger National Park, just over the border in South Africa.

The area forms the nucleus of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, one of the cross-border, so-called "peace parks" being developed to stimulate regional tourism ahead of the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa. (dpa)