Beijing - More than 500 reservoirs were damaged by Monday's
devastating earthquake in south-western China, posing a flood risk to
several towns and cities, the government said on Thursday, prompting
troops to evacuate as many people as possible from one town close to
the epicentre of the quake.
A lake had formed on the Bai He river upstream from Beichuan town
after a landslide caused by the earthquake blocked the river, an
official from the Sichuan Seismological Bureau told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur dpa by telephone.
Because of the high risk of flooding, troops evacuated everyone to
higher ground before returning to continue their rescue work in
Beichuan, which was home to about 30,000 people, state media said.
The Sichuan official declined to respond when asked how the
government planned to tackle the blockage on the Bai He.
Officials estimated that up to 5,000 died in Beichuan, where about
80 per cent of buildings collapsed in the old town and 60 per cent in
the new town.
The troops had evacuated more than 10,000 people from Beichuan,
state media said late Thursday, but they were continuing to dig
through rubble in the hope of rescuing some of the thousands of
people still missing in the town.
The water ministry reported that 391 reservoirs were damaged in
Sichuan, including two large reservoirs, with 129 damaged in the
neighbouring region of Chongqing.
Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei on Thursday said that quake
damage to rivers, dams, reservoirs and hydropower plants posed a
'serious threat' of flooding in several areas of Sichuan and
neighbouring provinces.
Most reservoirs in Sichuan had sustained 'significant but still
unknown damage' during Monday's 7.8-magnitude quake, state media
quoted Chen as saying.
'Inadequate management systems and poor data collection' meant
that officials also did not know the full extent of damage to
hydropower plants, the official Xinhua news agency quoted him as
saying.
Flood control at damaged reservoirs, hydropower plants and dikes
would be a crucial part of the government's relief work, aided by
satellite imaging and aerial photography, he said.
More residents may have to be evacuated along other rivers with a
high flood risk, Chen said.
But the water ministry deemed the Zipingpu dam, close to the quake
epicentre in Sichuan's Wenchuan county, 'structurally stable and
safe,' the agency said.
Workers and engineers had rushed to build a temporary outlet from
the reservoir behind the dam on Wednesday, after quake damage caused
a build-up of water, cracked the dam wall, and destroyed buildings at
the Zipingpu hydropower plant.
'If Zipingpu develops a serious safety problem, it could bring
disaster to Dujiangyan city,' where some 500,000 people live
downstream along the Min River, the ministry said in a statement on
its website on Wednesday.
Paratroopers who gave an initial report to state media on
Wednesday from Sichuan's isolated Maoxian county said two more dams
were at risk of breaking at hydropower stations that were 'severely
damaged' in the quake.
But the famous Dujiangyan irrigation system, which dates back more
than 2,000 years, was reported safe.
There was also no significant impact from the quake on the massive
Three Gorges dam and hydropower plant along the Yangtze River,
reports said.
Monday's earthquake killed more than 50,000 people, according to a
government estimate announced late Thursday.
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