Officials in China rush to evacuate 150,000

The Chinese authorities are evacuating 150,000 people threatened by possible flooding from a lake in southwest China formed by landslides following this month’s earthquake, and military engineers struggled Tuesday to dig sluiceways to drain the water safely.

The landslides dammed a major river in Tangjiashan, just north of Beichuan, one of the towns hardest hit by the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province. Relief officials have ordered the immediate evacuation those in the region whose towns would be swept away if the dam burst.

Parts of western Sichuan Province have seen heavy rains in recent days, causing water levels to rise fast on the dammed river.

Chinese officials rushed Tuesday to evacuate another 80,000 people in the path of potential floodwaters building up behind a quake-spawned dam, state media reported, as soldiers scraped a channel to try to drain away the threat.

Emergency workers would try to complete the evacuation by midnight Tuesday, taking the number of people moved out of the threatened valley to 160,000, from more than 30 townships, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Tangjiashan lake in northern Sichuan province, formed when a massive landslide blocked a river, is one of dozens of fragile dams created during the earthquake that pose a new destructive threat in the disaster zone.

Soldiers hauled explosives through the mountains to reach the area, and the official China Daily said Tuesday on its Web Site they were "preparing to dynamite the barrier." State television showed live footage of heavy earth-moving equipment being used to carve out a 200-yard channel to drain the water.

"We are prepared to get rid of the trees by chopping and explosion. After that, the second batch of equipment will be moved in," Liu Ning, chief engineer at the Ministry of Water Resources, was quoted as saying on CCTV.

The lake is swelling behind a landslide near Beichuan, one of the towns hit hardest by the May 12 tremor that devastated Sichuan.

The number of deaths from the quake has climbed further toward an expected toll of 80,000 or more. The Cabinet said Tuesday that 67,183 people were confirmed killed — up by about 2,000 from a day earlier — and 20,790 were sill missing.

Also on Tuesday, health officials said higher-than-normal rates of stomach pains and fever had been reported among the millions of quake survivors, but that no major disease outbreaks had occurred.

Some 5 million people were left homeless by the quake, and many of them are living in tents or makeshift communities that are clustered throughout the disaster zone.

Qi Xiaoqiu, the director of disease prevention at the health ministry, told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday the quake had knocked out much of the region's health infrastructure, 12 field hospitals had been erected and tens of thousands of health professionals were working in the zone.