By Huang Zhiling (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-26 08:12

QINGCHUAN, Sichuan -- Wang Mihe, his wife Yang Yuping and about 1,000 other farmers of Bayi village in Shiba township have been evacuated by the military to Yuanba in Guangyuan city, Sichuan province.

"We're happy to be resettled in Yuanba the quake has razed all the houses in Shiba where 7,000 people lived (and) cracks half a meter wide can be found in the fields. It's difficult for people to resume farming," the 60-year-old Wang says.

Resettlement of about 2,000 people from Qingchuan to Jianke county in Guangyuan, too, started Sunday. "They are the first batch of quake survivors to be relocated outside Qingchuan county, which is part of Guangyuan.

Another 20,000 survivors will be resettled outside Qingchuan, half of them in districts and counties of Guangyuan, and the rest in Zhejiang and Shaanxi provinces, says He Shunhong, vice-mayor of Guangyuan. And the government will grant more than 1 mu (0.07 hectares) of arable land to each of the first 3,000 survivors resettled in Guangyuan.

The provincial governments of Zhejiang and Shaanxi have agreed to accept 10,000 survivors from Qingchuan, He says.

Qingchuan sits on two fault lines and more than 90 per cent of its area is mountainous. "It's quite difficult to repair roads damaged in the quake that's why people have to be relocated."

Survivors in remote Shiba and Magong, which had 17,000 residents, will have to be relocated first, and the latter township will a turned into a nature reserve, He says. It takes more than 10 hours to trek down from Shiba and Magong to the nearest camp now, and soldiers have decided to either airlift the old and injured or carry them on their back to safety.

Li Haosheng, Qingchuan Party chief, says the county needs 90,000 tents to provide shelter to the survivors.

"About 95 per cent of the houses in the county of 250,000 people have collapsed or become too dangerous to live in, forcing people to stay in the open," Li says.

Since Qingchuan has a low grain yield "it needs outside help for food for at least the next three months", he says. "That means 4,000 tons of grains and 400 tons of edible oil a month."

The grave situation that Qingchuan faces was unknown to the outside world because its road and telecom links had been cut off for more than 20 hours after the May 12 quake.

The county has been facing disasters for the past three years. "It was ravaged by floods, rare in the county, in 2005 and 2006, and was lashed by a deadly snowstorm last year." Li says. Now the quake has claimed 4,623 lives, left 14,302 injured and 199 missing.

Worse, "the death toll could rise further because many people are still buried under the debris of buildings", says Yuan Yuxian, chief of the county's civil affairs bureau.