(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-31 08:20

More than 34,000 residents began evacuating downtown Mianyang on Friday afternoon, as fears rose the Tangjiashan quake lake - to the north of Beichuan county - might burst its banks.

Tents have been erected on nearby hillsides, and a 10-day supply of food and drinking water has been provided, a police officer surnamed Zhang told China Daily.

The evacuees' homes are near the banks of the Fujiang River, which runs through the city. Residents of other parts of the city were not evacuated.

Residents start evacuating from downtown Mianyang, Sichuan province, as the threat of a quake lake bursting its banks mounts May 30, 2008. [Xinhua]

The evacuation was scheduled to end at 5 pm on Saturday, Zhang said. It is in response to the possible threat of the lake bursting its banks and inundating the downstream area.

The lake, one of 34 such bodies of water, was formed when landslides caused by the May 12 quake blocked the Jianjiang River, which runs into the Fujiang River about 40 km north of Mianyang.

Earlier reports said nearly 160,000 people had already been evacuated from areas downstream as a precaution against the threat of flooding.

On Friday, the Xinhua News Agency reported that 1.3 million people living downstream from Tangjiashan had been ordered to evacuate to higher ground.

However, Zhou Hua, a Mianyang official who is the spokesman for the lake relief effort, said the report was inaccurate.

"There is a training exercise scheduled for tomorrow to test our contingency plan to move that many people," he said.

"But there will be no public participation, and we see no reason at all to actually implement the plan at this stage."

Meanwhile, work on a sluice to divert water from the lake was said to be progressing smoothly on Friday.

More than 700 troops are working around the clock using more than 40 excavators and bulldozers.

By noon on Friday, the troops had removed more than a third of the earth needed to clear a channel. The sluice is expected to be completed by Thursday.

As of midday Friday, the death toll from the quake had risen to 68,858, with 366,586 injured and 18,618 still missing, the Information Office of the State Council said.

More than 45.5 million people have been affected by the quake, of whom 15.15 million have been relocated, it said.

As of noon Friday, hospitals had treated 88,617 injured, of whom 58,356 had been discharged, it said.

Also, 3,400 temporary shelters have been set up in, and 664,500 tents sent to, the quake areas.

In the 24 hours prior to noon on Friday, 174 aftershocks were detected in Sichuan, but none was above magnitude 5, the information office said.

A total of 9,304 aftershocks have been recorded since May 12, it said.

By noon on Friday, domestic and foreign donations had reached 39.9 billion yuan ($5.75 billion).

Also on Friday, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) predicted a relatively dry period for the quake-hit regions over the coming weeks.

"There will be no heavy rain or rainstorms in Sichuan province and southern parts of Gansu and Shaanxi provinces in the next 10 days," Zhai Panmao, deputy director of the prediction and disaster mitigation department of the CMA, said.

Daily highs in those areas are not expected to exceed 35 C.

In Beijing, Xu Shaoxian, minister of land and resources, said on Friday that preventing secondary disasters in quake zones is now "critical" because of the continuous aftershocks and the pending rains.

"The flood season is now due in most parts of China," he told a news briefing.