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Chinese battle quake lake amid official confusion
2008-05-30
China's struggle to overcome earthquake devastation has been compounded by conflicting official claims about plans to evacuate 1.3 million people in a city threatened by a swelling "quake lake." Facing outrage from grieving parents, the government, meanwhile, vowed to punish anyone responsible for school buildings that collapsed in the quake, killing thousands of children. The landslide-blocked river at Tangjiashan in southwest China's Sichuan province is the most pressing danger after the magnitude 7.9 quake struck on May 12. The official death toll is 68,858 and is sure to rise with 18,618 missing, and there is widespread worry that more than 30 landslide-blocked rivers could burst and bring havoc to downstream towns and tent camps. The state Xinhua news agency said Tan Li, Communist Party chief of Mianyang in the quake zone, ordered 1.3 million people downstream from Tangjiashan to "evacuate to higher ground." But Zhou Hua, a Mianyang official who is a spokesman for the lake relief effort, told Reuters that report was "mistaken." "There is a virtual training exercise scheduled for tomorrow to test our contingency plan to move that many people," he said. "The exercise will test the command system from the top to the very bottom with community teams, but it's a government internal exercise that won't mobilize the public....Don't confuse practice with a real emergency. This is not." Xinhua's Chinese-language service also said it was a training exercise. But the service's later English-language report appeared adamant that more than training was afoot. "The mass evacuation, dubbed a 'drill' by local government officials, is said to make way for a possible flood discharging operation set for the weekend," Xinhua said. In villages outside Mianyang city there were no immediate signs of either mass panic or exodus. "The government and the army are working on it and won't let it burst," said Jin Dongsheng, a farmer in Qingyi town near the city. He and about 3,000 town residents had been moved about half an hour's walk uphill from homes close the river bank. RECONSTRUCTION At the unstable Tangjiashan lake, hundreds of troops have removed more than a third of the earth for a channel intended to ease pressure from the rising waters, Zhou said. Up to 190,000 residents downstream had moved to higher ground, usually hillsides close to where they were living before, to avoid a surge if the blockage suddenly gave way, he said. Xinhua said the water level was nearly 23 meters (75 feet) below the lowest point of the barrier, which experts have said could give way quickly once breached. A Chinese meteorological authority official, Zhai Panmao, told a news conference that the authority did not expect heavy rain in the area in the next 10 days. "We have full confidence in solving this problem," he said of the Tangjiashan build-up. Post-quake reconstruction work has only begun, with many displaced people facing a cramped, sweltering summer in tents. The government has received 35.28 billion yuan ($5.1 billion) in donations of cash and goods from home and abroad to date, officials said. But some aid pledged has yet to be received, and a deputy head of the Ministry of Civil Affairs disaster relief office, Pang Chenmin, warned tardy donors they could be publicly shamed. CHILDREN DEAD Meanwhile, an official investigator pinpointed the poor design and construction of at least one of the many schools that collapsed during the quake, killing thousands of children. Domestic media reports compiled by Reuters put the combined toll from deaths of children and teachers in quake-hit schools at more than 9,000. The Chinese public has been especially outraged by school buildings that fell while nearby apartments and government offices survived. An official investigator said one of the schools that crumpled, the Juyuan Middle School, where hundreds of children died, was fatally weakened by poor design and materials. "There were certainly problems with site selection, the building's structure and structural features, the construction and materials," Chen Baosheng, an expert from Tongji University in Shanghai, told the Southern Weekend. With growing threats of protests and lawsuits, the government said grieving parents should be comforted and lawbreakers behind shoddy schools punished. "If illegalities are found in design and construction, they must be investigated and punished according to the law," a meeting of senior quake-response officials in Beijing ordered, according to state television news. (Additional reporting by Chisa Fujioka in Tokyo, Chris Buckley, Guo Shipeng and Beijing newsroom; Writing by Chris Buckley; Editing by Nick Macfie and David Fogarty)
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